A Novel Phase-Difference Fingerprinting Technique for Localization of Unknown Emitters

Localization of unknown emitters is crucial to tackle illegal radios or radio jammers which may cause harmful interference to other communication systems and disrupt services. Conventional fingerprint-based localization techniques that utilize received signal strength or channel information as location fingerprints may face problems when dealing with emitters whose parameters, such as center frequency, are unknown. In this paper, a novel localization algorithm utilizing the phase-difference between elements of an antenna array as location fingerprints is proposed. The training fingerprints are interpolated in the frequency and spatial domains before performing pattern matching with the unknown emitter's fingerprints. Localization accuracy was evaluated through ray-tracing and Monte Carlo simulations, and results indicate that the proposed technique achieved relatively good performance compared to other localization techniques.