Distributed source localization in a wireless sensor network

Williams, Stephen M., Schmidt, Peter L. and Frampton, Kenneth D. (2005) Distributed source localization in a wireless sensor network. Journal of the Acoustical Society of America, 117 (4), p.2610.

Abstract

This work concerns experimental implementation of distributed acoustic source localization with a wireless sensor network. The envisioned application is the distribution of hundreds or thousands of small, semi-disposable, wireless sensor nodes (possibly by airdrop). These nodes would form an ad-hoc communications network and monitor and track acoustic events within the array. Centralized processing of such data would be prohibited by the excessive communications and complexity of calculations. Furthermore, localization with a network of randomly placed sensors is not suited to use of traditional array theories due to irregular placement of sensors and the unknown sensitivity and phase relationships between sensors. Therefore, a fully distributed localization algorithm was developed in which nodes organize themselves into groups which collaborate to locate sources. Acoustic event time-of-arrival information is shared among group members and the source locations were determined using Tikhonov regularized inversion. Small scale localization experiments (with 10 sensor nodes) were conducted to validate the performance of the method. Results are discussed, along with limitations of the method discovered during conduct of the experiments. In addition, a comparison is made between this method and traditional matrix solution methods.

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