Energy-based model-independent source localization in wireless sensor networks

Localization of an isotropic source using energy measurements from distributed sensors is considered. Usually, such localization techniques require that the distances between the sensor nodes and the source of interest have been previously estimated. This, in turn, requires that sufficient information about the energy decay model as well as the transmit power of the source is available. In this work, making the assumption that the locations of nodes near the source can be well described by a uniform distribution, we derive distance estimates that are independent of both the energy decay model and the transmit power of the source. Numerical results show that these estimates lead to improved localization accuracy as compared to other model-independent approaches.