Wireless sensor networks are fundamental blocks of Internet of Things (IoT) which sense a physical phenomenon and aggregates the sensed data. Numerous IoT applications require human intervention for network maintenance. Several approaches have been proposed in the literature for creating the location map (localization) that associates physical locations to the nodes. However, searching a node of interest for servicing in a large-scale network with the knowledge of location map is a tedious task. In this paper, we propose a smartphone based acoustic navigation tool that can be used along with the location map to ease the search of a specific sensor node. We make use of the Doppler effect of acoustic wave for navigating the user towards the node of interest. Our approach is of lower complexity which can be implemented in a real-world scenario. In addition, the proposed algorithm takes into account the missing probability of the node of interest. Performance is investigated in terms of time required for searching the node of interest with respect to the network size. Experiments demonstrate that the proposed method helps the user to reach a node of interest with an average difference of 0.071% to ideal search time. © 2019, Springer Science+Business Media, LLC, part of Springer Nature.