Unknown RSSD-Based Localization CRLB Analysis With Semidefinite Programming

Passive source localization is an important research area with numerous applications in mobile communications and signal processing. This paper presents an analysis of energy-based localization performance with unknown transmit power using received signal strength (RSS) and RSS difference (RSSD) models. These models are widely used because of their low cost and simple implementation. Previous studies were based on the assumption that the source node transmit power is known, which is not practical in many situations. The Cramér-Rao lower bound for the RSS and RSSD models with correlated noise is derived as a performance benchmark for the mean squared error (MSE) of the location and transmit power estimation. It is shown that the MSE can be factored into two independent terms corresponding to the geometric distribution of the sensors and the channel parameters including the noise variance. The effect of the sensor and source node positions on the location accuracy and the MSE is derived via the geometric dilution of precision (GDOP). The GDOP is then used to evaluate the effect of the joint estimation of unknown power and source location on the performance. Lower bounds on the GDOP are derived to obtain the minimum MSE. The RSSD solution is obtained by formulating the nonlinear and nonconvex objective functions into a convex optimization problem through relaxation and semidefinite programming. Simulation results are presented with the source inside or outside the sensor network.