Localization of Radio Controlled Unintended Emitting Devices

Localization of unintended passive emissions from radio controlled (RC) devices has a great importance due to security concerns. This paper analyzes the challenges of locating such devices in the presence of multipath fading by using angle of arrival (AoA) method for passive devices. Phased array processing, smooth multiple signal classification (Smooth MUSIC) algorithms are the methods used to determine the AoA to locate the RC device. Though AoA techniques have been in existence for localization of active devices, such methods are not applied to locating passive devices. Two eight element uniform linear antenna array (ULA) receivers are placed along x and y directions and triangulation is utilized on the AoA information to determine the location. Indoor and outdoor experiment results for AoA by using two schemes and their localization of the RC device are presented. Results indicate that, smooth MUSIC algorithm outperforms the phased array processing method in terms of location accuracy of root mean square position error less than 12 ft provided the signal to noise ratio is equal or higher than 10 dB. Keywords—Localization, angle of arrival (AoA), array signal processing, multiple signal classification, spatial smoothing, uniform linear array (ULA).