Future military wireless communication in a battlefield will be mobile ad hoc in nature. The ability to geolocate and track both friendly forces and enemies is very important in military command and control operations. However, current mobile ad hoc networks (MANET) have no capabilities to geolocate radio emitters that belong to enemy mobile ad hoc networks. This paper presents a distributed geolocation algorithm using received signal strength differences to geolocate enemy radio emitters by leveraging friendly force MANET infrastructure, and proposes a communication protocol for radio emitter geolocation applications. An enemy's radio emitter signal is detected, and its signal strength is measured by the nodes in a friendly mobile ad hoc network. The identity of the enemy radio emitter is extracted from the decoded message header of the medium access control layer. By correlating and associating the enemy's radio emitter identity with its received signal strength, the enemy radio emitter is identified. The enemy's radio emitter identity and its received signal strength are distributed and shared among friendly mobile ad hoc nodes. Using received signal strength differences, a master friendly node can calculate the enemy's radio emitter geolocation, and build a recognized MANET picture (RMP). This MANET picture is then distributed to all friendly nodes for effective command and control operations. An advantage of this method is that mobile ad hoc nodes do not need special RF antennas to geolocate the enemy radio emitter as conventional electronic warfare techniques do. MATLAB-based simulations are presented to evaluate the accuracy and reliability of the proposed distributed geolocation algorithm under different MANET placements.

Date Published: 3 May 2012
PDF: 10 pages
Proc. SPIE 8404, Wireless Sensing, Localization, and Processing VII, 840406 (3 May 2012); doi: 10.1117/12.918035

Published in SPIE Proceedings Vol. 8404:
Wireless Sensing, Localization, and Processing VII
Sohail A. Dianat; Michael David Zoltowski, Editor(s)