Distributed target localization with inaccurate collaborative sensors in multipath environments

Location-aware networks are of great importance for both civil lives and military applications. Methods based on line-of-sight (LOS) measurements suffer sever performance loss in harsh environments such as indoor scenarios, where sensors can receive both LOS and non-line-of-sight (NLOS) measurements. In this paper, we propose a data association (DA) process based on the expectation maximization (EM) algorithm, which enables us to exploit multipath components (MPCs). By setting the mapping relationship between the measurements and scatters as a latent variable, coefficients of the Gaussian mixture model are estimated. Moreover, considering the misalignment of sensor position, we propose a space-alternating generalized expectation maximization (SAGE)-based algorithms to jointly update the target localization and sensor position information. A two dimensional (2-D) circularly symmetric Gaussian distribution is employed to approximate the probability density function of the sensor's position uncertainty via the minimization of the Kullback-Leibler divergence (KLD), which enables us to calculate the expectation step with low computational complexity. Moreover, a distributed implementation is derived based on the average consensus method to improve the scalability of the proposed algorithm. Simulation results demonstrate that the proposed centralized and distributed algorithms can perform close to the Monte Carlo-based method with much lower communication overhead and computational complexity.