Indoor 3-D Localization Based on Received Signal Strength Difference and Factor Graph for Unknown Radio Transmitter

Accurate localization of the radio transmitter is an important work in radio management. Previous research is more focused on two-dimensional (2-D) scenarios, but the localization of an unknown radio transmitter under three-dimensional (3-D) scenarios has more practical significance. In this paper, we propose a novel 3-D localization algorithm with received signal strength difference (RSSD) information and factor graph (FG), which is suitable for both line-of-sight (LOS) and non-line-of-sight (NLOS) condition. Considering the stochastic properties of measurement errors caused by the indoor environment, RSSD measurements are processed with mean and variance in the form of Gaussian distribution in the FG framework. A new 3-D RSSD-based FG model is constructed with the relationship between RSSD and location coordinates by local linearization technique. The soft-information computation and iterative process of the proposed model are derived by using the sum-product algorithm. In addition, the impacts of different grid distances and number of signal receivers on positioning accuracy are explored. Finally, the performance of our proposed approach is experimentally evaluated in a real scenario. The results show that the positioning performance of the proposed algorithm is not only superior to the k-nearest neighbors (kNN) algorithm and least square (LS) algorithm, but also it can achieve a mean localization error as low as 1.15 m. Our proposed scheme provides a good solution for the accurate detection of an unknown radio transmitter under indoor 3-D space and has a good application prospect.