Wireless Source Localization Utilizing An Airborne Interfrometry

Abstract

This paper investigates the problem of localization of co-channel transmitters or primary users (PUs) using an array mounted on a moving aerial platform. As a practical alternative for a sensor network to pursue the localization task, the proposed Phase Interferometric Source Localization (PISL) technique utilizes a moving sensor that measures phase difference between two antennas mounted on the platform. Due to the sparse nature of PUs' distribution in the region, we model the localization task as a simple basis-pursuit denoising framework and introduce a reconstruction method using a sparse recovery algorithm to discover locations of unknown PUs based on the phase difference measurements. We show that the ratio of distance between two antennas to the carrier-frequency wavelength is the critical parameter making the localization feasible. We also propose a scheme for sensor motion design in order to maximize the number of detectable PUs based on mutual coherence property. Since the motion optimization problem is very hard to address we develop a simple geometric relaxation to address the problem. The simulation results show that PISL can precisely recover the map of PUs with only few measurements and also reveal that sensor motion path can have determinate effect on the localization accuracy. PISL performance is compared with an state-of-the-art technique that utilizes adaptive beamforming and results show the superiority of PISL results in localization accuracy.