Efficient Kernel Based 3-D Source Localization via Tensor Completion

Source localization in three-dimensional (3-D) wireless sensor networks (WSNs) is becoming a major research focus. Due to the complicated air-ground environments in 3-D positioning, many of the traditional localization methods, such as received signal strength (RSS) may have relatively poor accuracy performance. Benefit from prior learning mechanisms, fingerprinting-based localization methods are less sensitive to complex conditions and can provide relatively accurate localization performance. However, fingerprinting-based methods require training data at each grid point for constructing the fingerprint database, the overhead of which is very high, particularly for 3-D localization. Also, some of measured data may be unavailable due to the interference of a complicated environment. In this paper, we propose an efficient kernel based 3-D localization algorithm via tensor completion. We first exploit the spatial correlation of the RSS data and demonstrate the low rank property of the RSS data matrix. Based on this, a new training scheme is proposed that uses tensor completion to recover the missing data of the fingerprint database. Finally, we propose a kernel based learning technique in the matching phase to improve the sensitivity and accuracy in the final source position estimation. Simulation results show that our new method can effectively eliminate the impairment caused by incomplete sensing data to improve the localization performance.