Localization of multiple unknown RF sources by combining a power monitoring network and a guided moving sensor under constraints

This paper presents a Sequential Monte Carlo (SMC) method for the localization of an unknown number of RF sources with unknown transmit power. The proposed method uses Received Signal Strength (RSS) measurements taken by a network of static sensors and a guided moving sensor. A constraint is imposed on the number of trips that the moving sensor is allowed to make for the confirmation of the existence and the location of a new source. In order to identify sources of varying transmission power, the SMC algorithm incorporates an adaptive RSS threshold detection method. Simulations demonstrate the improvement in the performance of the proposed adaptive versus a fixed threshold algorithm, under the constraints of a limited number of sensor trips. Moreover, source identification performance is examined using different number of sensor trips and static sensors.