Gas source localization based on maximum likelihood with arbitrary deployment WSN

Timely detection and localization of the gas leak are heated issues in the area of wireless sensor networks (WSN). Different methods have been proposed for various applications. In this paper, a new scheme is presented to monitor and estimate the leak of gas source. In our proposed approach, the gas source is located by employing maximum likelihood (ML) while the gas concentration is collected by various wireless sensor nodes distributed in the field arbitrarily. Furthermore, two different distributions of the sensors nodes, number of sensor nodes and two back-ground noise types are also taken into consideration to achieve better performance in localization. The performance of the proposed method is studied through numerical simulations. The experimental results show that when the number of sensor nodes is rather small, the uniform distribution performs better than the random distribution, but this effect is less and less distinct with the increase of sensor nodes. Finally, the impact of the different noise types to estimation error is analyzed and how to choose a suitable deployed method is discussed based on the number of sensor nodes according to the simulation results.