The heuristic optimization algorithm is a popular optimization method for solving optimization problems. A novel meta-heuristic algorithm was proposed in this paper, which is called the Willow Catkin Optimization (WCO) algorithm. It mainly consists of two processes: spreading seeds and aggregating seeds. In the first process, WCO tries to make the seeds explore the solution space to find the local optimal solutions. In the second process, it works to develop each optimal local solution and find the optimal global solution. In the experimental section, the performance of WCO is tested with 30 test functions from CEC 2017. WCO was applied in the Time Difference of Arrival and Frequency Difference of Arrival (TDOA-FDOA) co-localization problem of moving nodes in Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs). Experimental results show the performance and applicability of the WCO algorithm.

Sine Cosine Algorithm (SCA) finds the best solution to the optimization problem by the periodicity of sine and cosine trigonometric functions. However, it is computationally intensive and contains many parameters to be determined. Fortunately, there are FPGA platforms that can be used to overcome these limitations by improving latency. Sine and cosine calculation in library functions is very complex and time-consuming. Therefore, this paper proposes a hardware-accelerated CORDIC algorithm to improve the sine cosine trigonometric function that needs to be computed in the SCA algorithm. The proposed algorithm (HSCA) combines the accelerated SCA algorithm and the CORDIC algorithm. HSCA performance is tested by using six test functions run on the FPGA. The experimental results show that HSCA is 3.25 times faster and 33% fewer resource utilizations for solving optimization problems, and runs significantly faster on FPGAs with IP cores than on Soc chips in FPGAs. The performance of the HSCA algorithm is demonstrated by applying it to the TDOA localization problem.