RSS-based sensor localization with unknown transmit power

Received signal strength (RSS)-based single source localization when there is not a prior knowledge about the transmit power of the source is investigated. Because of nonconvex behavior of maximum likelihood (ML) estimator, convoluted computations are required to achieve its global minimum. Therefore, we propose a novel semidefinite programming (SDP) approach by approximating ML problem to a convex optimization problem which can be solved very efficiently. Computer simulations show that our proposed SDP has a remarkable performance very close to ML estimator. Linearizing RSS model, we also derive the partly novel least squares (LS) and weighted total least squares (WTLS) algorithms for this problem. Simulations illustrate that WTLS improves the performance of LS considerably.