Distributed energy-based multi-source localization in wireless sensor network

Multi-source localization is an open and challenging research problem in the energy-based wireless sensor network (WSN) of acoustic sensors. Classic maximum likelihood (ML) algorithm can not work well due to the high computation demand. An expectation maximization (EM) algorithm was proposed in our previous paper to approximate the optimal solution with lower computational complexity. However that algorithm is centralized in nature in which all the observed data from each sensor node must be sent to the fusion centre. It has several drawbacks including the relying on the centre which may be damaged or shut down, poor scalability with the increasing of network size, and the high communication overhead requirement when a sensor is far away from the centre. In this paper we propose a distributed EM algorithm for multi-source localization in energy-based WSN. It can achieve satisfactory localization accuracy with significantly low communication and computation cost.