Abstract: To reduce the positioning error of DV-Hop in three-dimensional space and improve the positioning accuracy of nodes, a three-dimensional positioning algorithm based on hop correction and lion swarm optimization in wireless sensor networks (WSNs) is proposed (HCLSO-3D). Firstly, through the propagation of multiple communication radii, the node hops are accurately divided to obtain the optimized hop value. Secondly, the similar path search algorithm is used to obtain the path of the most similar anchor node pair between the to-be-determined location node and the corresponding anchor node, and the average hop distance of this path is corrected to obtain the average hop distance from the to-be- determined location node to the target anchor node. Finally, the lion swarm optimization algorithm is used to solve the coordinates of the to-be-determined node. The simulation results show that, compared with the 3D-DVHop algorithm and the algorithm in reference [16], HCLSO-3D significantly improves the positioning accuracy in the same network environment.

Key words: wireless sensor networks, three-dimensional node localization, multiple communication radii, hop correction, lion swarm optimization