Development of a Model and Localization Algorithm for Received Signal Strength-Based Geolocation

Location-Based Services (LBS), also called geolocation, have become increasingly popular in the past decades. They have several uses ranging from assisting emergency personnel, military reconnaissance and applications in social media. In geolocation a group of sensors estimate the location of transmitters using position and Radio Frequency (RF) information. A review of the literature revealed that a majority of the Received Signal Strength (RSS) techniques used made erroneous assumptions about the distribution or ignored effects of multiple transmitters, noise and multiple antennas. Further, the corresponding algorithms are often mathematically complex and computationally expensive. To address the issues this dissertation focused on RSS models which account for external factors effects and algorithms that are more efficient and accurate

Improved Wireless Security through Physical Layer Protocol Manipulation and Radio Frequency Fingerprinting

Wireless networks are particularly vulnerable to spoofing and route poisoning attacks due to the contested transmission medium. Traditional bit-layer defenses including encryption keys and MAC address control lists are vulnerable to extraction and identity spoofing, respectively. This dissertation explores three novel strategies to leverage the wireless physical layer to improve security in low-rate wireless personal area networks. The first, physical layer protocol manipulation, identifies true transceiver design within remote devices through analysis of replies in response to packets transmitted with modified physical layer headers. Results herein demonstrate a methodology that correctly differentiates among six IEEE 802.15.4 transceiver classes with greater than 99% accuracy, regardless of claimed bit-layer identity. The second strategy, radio frequency fingerprinting, accurately identifies the true source of every wireless transmission in a network, even among devices of the same design and manufacturer. Results suggest that even low-cost signal collection receivers can achieve greater than 90% authentication accuracy within a defense system based on radio frequency fingerprinting. The third strategy, based on received signal strength quantification, can be leveraged to rapidly locate suspicious transmission sources and to perform physical security audits of critical networks. Results herein reduce mean absolute percentage error of a widely-utilized distance estimation model 20% by examining signal strength measurements from real-world networks in a military hospital and a civilian hospital

Resource Allocation for Coordinated Multipoint Joint Transmission System and Received Signal Strength Based Positioning in Long Term Evolution Network

The Long-Term Evolution Advanced (LTE-A) system are expected to provide high speed and high quality services, which are supported by emerging technologies such as Coordinated Multipoint (CoMP) transmission and reception. Dynamic resource allocation plays a vital role in LTE-A design and planning, which is investigated in this thesis. In addition, Received Signal Strength (RSS) based positioning is also investigated in orthogonal frequency division multiplexing (OFDM) based wireless networks, which is based on an industry project. In the first contribution, a physical resource blocks (PRB) allocation scheme with fuzzy logic based user selection is proposed. This work considers three parameters and exploit a fuzzy logic (FL) based criterion to categorize users. As a result, it enhances accuracy of user classification. This work improves system capacity by a ranking based PRBs allocation schemes. Simulation results show that proposed fuzzy logic based user selection scheme improves performance for CoMP users. Proposed ranking based greedy allocation algorithm cut complexity in half but maintain same performance. In the second contribution, a two-layer proportional-fair (PF) user scheduling scheme is proposed. This work focused on fairness between CoMP and Non-CoMP users instead of balancing fairness in each user categories. Proposed scheme jointly optimizes fairness and system capacity over both CoMP and Non-CoMP users. Simulation results show that proposed algorithm significantly improves fairness between CoMP and Non-CoMP users. In the last contribution, RSS measurement method in LTE system is analyzed and a realizable RSS measurement method is proposed to fight against multipath effect. Simulation results shows that proposed method significantly reduced measurement error caused by multipath. In RSS based positioning area, this is the first work that consider exploiting LTE’s own signal strength measurement mechanism to enhance accuracy of positioning. Furthermore, the proposed method can be deployed in modern LTE system with limited cost

Air Force Institute of Technology Research Report 2013

This report summarizes the research activities of the Air Force Institute of Technology’s Graduate School of Engineering and Management. It describes research interests and faculty expertise; lists student theses/dissertations; identifies research sponsors and contributions; and outlines the procedures for contacting the school. Included in the report are: faculty publications, conference presentations, consultations, and funded research projects. Research was conducted in the areas of Aeronautical and Astronautical Engineering, Electrical Engineering and Electro-Optics, Computer Engineering and Computer Science, Systems Engineering and Management, Operational Sciences, Mathematics, Statistics and Engineering Physics

Algorithms and Methods for Received Signal Strength Based Wireless Localization

In the era of wireless communications, the demand for localization and localization-based services has been continuously growing, as increasingly smarter wireless devices have emerged to the market. Besides the already available satellite-based localization systems, such as the GPS and GLONASS, also other localization approaches are needed to complement the existing solutions. Finding different types of low-cost localization methods, especially for indoors, has become one of the most important research topics in recent years.One of the most used approaches in localization is based on Received Signal Strength (RSS) information. Specific fingerprints about RSS are collected and stored and positioning can be done through pattern or feature matching algorithms or through statistical inference. A great and immediate advantage of the RSS-based localization is its ability to exploit the already existing infrastructure of different communications networks without the need to install additional system hardware. Furthermore, due to the evident connection between the RSS level and the quality of a communications signal, the RSS is usually inherently included in the network measurements. This favors the availability of the RSS measurements in the current and future wireless communications systems.In this thesis, we study the suitability of RSS for localization in various communications systems including cellular networks, wireless local area networks, personal area networks, such as WiFi, Bluetooth and Radio Frequency Identification (RFID) tags. Based on substantial real-life measurement campaigns, we study different characteristics of RSS measurements and propose several Path Loss (PL) models to capture the essential behavior of the RSS levels in 2D outdoor and 3D indoor environments. By using the PL models, we show that it is possible to attain similar performance to fingerprinting with a database size of only 1-2% of the database size needed in fingerprinting. In addition, we study the effect of different error sources, such as database calibration errors, on the localization accuracy. Moreover, we propose a novel method for studying how coverage gaps in the fingerprint database affect the localization performance. Here, by using various interpolation and extrapolation methods, we improve the localization accuracy with imperfect fingerprint databases, such as those including substantial cover-age gaps due to inaccessible parts of the buildings

A STUDY ON RECEIVED SIGNAL STRENGTH BASED INDOOR LOCALIZATION

Ph.DDOCTOR OF PHILOSOPH