Two-Phase Robust Target Localization in Ocean Sensor Networks Using Received Signal Strength Measurements

Target localization plays a vital role in ocean sensor networks (OSNs), in which accurate position information is not only a critical need of ocean observation but a necessary condition for the implementation of ocean engineering. Compared with other range-based localization technologies in OSNs, the received signal strength (RSS)-based localization technique has attracted widespread attention due to its low cost and synchronization-free nature. However, maintaining relatively good accuracy in an environment as dynamic and complex as the ocean remains challenging. One of the most damaging factors that degrade the localization accuracy is the uncertainty in transmission power. Besides the equipment loss, the uncertain factors in the fickle ocean environment may result in a significant deviation between the standard rated transmission power and the usable transmission power. The difference between the rated and actual transmission power would lead to an extra error when it comes to the localization in OSNs. In this case, a method that can locate the target without needing prior knowledge of the transmission power is proposed. The method relies on a two-phase procedure in which the location information and the transmission power are jointly estimated. First, the original nonconvex localization problem is transformed into an alternating non-negativity-constrained least square framework with the unknown transmission power (UT-ANLS). Under this framework, a two-stage optimization method based on interior point method (IPM) and majorization-minimization tactic (MMT) is proposed to search for the optimal solution. In the first stage, the barrier function method is used to limit the optimization scope to find an approximate solution to the problem. However, it is infeasible to approach the constraint boundary due to its intrinsic error. Then, in the second stage, the original objective is converted into a surrogate function consisting of a convex quadratic and concave term. The solution obtained by IPM is considered the initial guess of MMT to jointly estimate both the location and transmission power in the iteration. In addition, in order to evaluate the performance of IPM-MM, the Cramer Rao lower bound (CRLB) is derived. Numerical simulation results demonstrate that IPM-MM achieves better performance than the others in different scenarios.