Decentralized fault tolerant source localization without sensor parameters in wireless sensor networks

In this paper, we study the source (event) localization problem in decentralized wireless sensor networks (WSNs) under faulty sensor nodes without knowledge of the sensor parameters. Source localization has many applications, such as localizing WiFi hotspots and mobile users. Some works in the literature localize the source by utilizing the knowledge or estimates of the fault probability of each sensor node or the region of influence of the source. However, this paper proposes two approaches: the hitting set and feature selection for estimating the source location without any knowledge of the sensor parameters under faulty sensor nodes in WSN. The proposed approaches provide better or comparable source localization performances. For the hitting set approach, we also derive a lower bound on the required number of samples. In addition, we extend the proposed methods for localizing multiple sources. Finally, we provide extensive simulations to illustrate the performances of the proposed methods against the centroid, maximum likelihood (ML), fault-tolerant ML (FTML), and subtract on negative add on positive (SNAP) estimators. The proposed approaches significantly outperform the centroid and maximum likelihood estimators for faulty sensor nodes while providing comparable or better performance to FTML or SNAP algorithm. In addition, we use real-world WiFi data set to localize the source in comparison to the support vector machine based estimator in the literature, where the proposed methods outperformed the estimator.