Communication-Efficient Coordinated RSS-Based Distributed Passive Localization via Drone Cluster

Multi-UAV passive localization via received signal strength (RSS) is extremely important for wide applications such as rescue and battlefield combat. However, the energy consumption of UAVs is a key issue in this UAVs-enabled application. Usually, the communication overhead plays an important role in the energy consumption. To address this problem, we design two distributed methods for this multi-UAV system with considerable performance under low communication overhead. Firstly, a distributed majorize-minimization (DMM) method is proposed. To accelerate its convergence, a tight upper bound of the objective function from the primary one is derived. Furthermore, a distributed estimation scheme using the Fisher information matrix (DEF) is presented, only requiring one round of communication between edge UAVs and central UAV. Simulation results show that the proposed DMM outperforms the existing distributed iterative methods in terms of root of mean square error (RMSE) under low communication overhead. Moreover, the most communication-effective DEF with local search estimation performs much better than the proposed DMM in terms of RMSE, but has a higher computational complexity.