Emitter location in the presence of information injection

One sensor network task of particular interest is estimating with maximum accuracy the location of an emitter. In this paper, we focus on the impact of a single rogue sensor which injects spurious information into a sensor network in order to maximally degrade location estimation accuracy. Our focus is on understanding and characterizing the impact of such a rogue sensor where as on-going work is focusing on methods to mitigate its impact. The goal is to exploit the nature of the shared wireless medium and sensitivity of localization methods to inaccurate sensor positioning. We find the false location that minimizes the accuracy of a sensor network tasked with estimating the location of an emitter. We assume a means for injecting the false location exists and that the network uses a time and frequency difference of arrival (TDOA/FDOA) localization method. We determine the best location to inject by formulating the problem as the minimization of the determinant of the Fisher Information Matrix (FIM). A numerical method for determining the false location is presented and we show that it significantly reduces the location estimate´s accuracy independent of sensor-emitter geometry.