Target localization in wireless sensor networks using error correcting codes

In this paper, we consider the task of target localization using quantized data in wireless sensor networks. We propose a computationally efficient localization scheme by modeling it as an iterative classification problem. We design coding theory based iterative approaches for target localization where at every iteration, the fusion center (FC) solves an M-ary hypothesis testing problem and decides the region of interest for the next iteration. The coding theory based iterative approach works well even in the presence of Byzantine (malicious) sensors in the network. We further consider the effect of non-ideal channels. We suggest the use of soft-decision decoding to compensate for the loss due to the presence of fading channels between the local sensors and FC. We evaluate the performance of the proposed schemes in terms of the Byzantine fault tolerance capability and probability of detection of the target region. We also present performance bounds, which help us in designing the system. We provide asymptotic analysis of the proposed schemes and show that the schemes achieve perfect region detection irrespective of the noise variance when the number of sensors tends to infinity. Our numerical results show that the proposed schemes provide a similar performance in terms of mean square error as compared with the traditional maximum likelihood estimation but are computationally much more efficient and are resilient to errors due to Byzantines and non-ideal channels.