On diffusive source localization using dumb sensors

Abstract

The problem of estimating the location and time of origin of an instantaneous source of a particular gas using a simple sensor network is investigated in this paper. Here, the gas spreads by diffusion and the sensors make a binary decision on the existence of the gas by measuring its concentration in their immediate vicinity. The inability of the sensors to go beyond a binary resolution of the concentration justifies their classification as dumb. In this paper, it is restricted to the one-dimensional case where the sensors form a linear array. The analysis of the Cramer-Rao bound (CRB) to study the limits of estimation performance is numerically calculated. Based on the number of gas molecules the Poisson distribution by a Gaussian distribution with mean and variance is approximated.