Emitter localization in urban scenarios

In many applications of public safety, security, and emergency scenarios electromagnetic emitters such as cell phones have to be located. However, in urban environments an effective and reliable localization in a noncooperative case is a challenging task due to the propagation properties of the electromagnetic waves. In particular scenarios, buildings, vegetation and other obstacles (partly metallic ones such a lamp posts or signs) lead to shadowing, diffraction, and reflection of the signal. As a consequence the emitted wave is often measured as a superposition of the signal taking multiple paths. Therefore conventional direction finding (DF) approaches are likely to fail the localization task in these multi-path. The research project ""Emitter Localization in Multi-Path Environments"" (EiLT) [1] has the aim to develop the next generation of DF systems for surveillance and spectrum control in urban scenarios taking advantage of ray-tracing techniques, high resolution channel parameter estimation, wideband polarimetric DF antennas and data fusion algorithms.