Evaluation of RF Fingerprinting-Aided RSS-Based Target Localization for Emergency Response

TL;DR

This paper introduces an RF fingerprinting-aided initialization method for target localization that significantly improves accuracy and robustness over traditional SDP-based methods, especially in challenging environments.

Contribution

It proposes a novel RF fingerprinting-based maximum likelihood initialization technique for target localization, enhancing performance and robustness in various environments.

Findings

Performance improved by up to 63.31% compared to SDP-based initialization.

Average performance improvement of 39.13%.

Method less affected by poor geometry conditions.

Abstract

Target localization is essential for emergency dispatching situations. Maximum likelihood estimation (MLE) methods are widely used to estimate the target position based on the received signal strength measurements. However, the performance of MLE solvers is significantly affected by the initialization (i.e., initial guess of the solution or solution search space). To address this, a previous study proposed the semidefinite programming (SDP)-based MLE initialization. However, the performance of the SDP-based initialization technique is largely affected by the shadowing variance and geometric diversity between the target and receivers. In this study, a radio frequency (RF) fingerprinting-based MLE initialization is proposed. Further, a maximum likelihood problem for target localization combining RF fingerprinting is formulated. In the three test environments of open space, urban, and indoor, the proposed RF fingerprinting-aided target localization method showed a performance improvement of up to 63.31% and an average of 39.13%, compared to the MLE algorithm initialized with SDP. Furthermore, unlike the SDP-MLE method, the proposed method was not significantly affected by the poor geometry between the target and receivers in our experiments.