Source Localization and Tracking in a Dispersive Medium using Wireless Sensor Network

In this paper, we address the issue of collaborative information processing for diffusive source localization and tracking using wireless sensor networks (WSNs) capable of sensing in dispersive medium/environment. We first determine the space-time concentration distribution of the dispersion from physical modeling and mathematical formulations of an underwater oil spill scenario considering the effect of laminar water velocity as an external force. For static diffusive source localization, we propose two parametric estimation techniques based on maximumlikelihood (ML) and best linear unbiased estimator (BLUE) for the special case of our physical dispersion model. We prove the consistency and asymptotic normality of the obtained ML solution when the number of sensor nodes and samples approach infinity, and derive the Cramér-Rao lower bound (CRLB) on its performance. We also propose a particle filter (PF) based target tracking scheme for moving diffusive source, and derive the posterior Cramér-Rao lower bound (PCRLB) for the moving source state estimates as a theoretical performance bound. The performance of the proposed schemes are shown through numerical simulations and compared with the derived theoretical bounds.