Channel aware adaptive quantization for target localization in wireless sensor networks

This paper considers the problem of quantization schemes for source localization in wireless sensor networks. First, a channel-aware adaptive quantization scheme for target location estimation is proposed and local sensor nodes dynamically adjust their quantization thresholds according to a kind of position-based information sequences. The scheme incorporates the statistics of imperfect wireless channels between sensors and the fusion center. Furthermore, the appropriate maximum likelihood estimator (MLE) and the performance metric Cramér-Rao lower bound (CRLB) are derived. Simulation results are presented to show that the appropriated CRLB is less than the fixed-quantization channel-aware CRLB and the proposed MLE will approach its CRLB when the number of sensors is large enough.