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A growing set of environmental sensing applications use received signal strength measurements of a static wireless network for unobtrusive monitoring purposes. The success of these systems, which typically process low-amplitude signals, depend strongly on the distribution of the measurements when there are no changes in the channel. In this letter, a statistical model for signal strength measurements acquired when the environment is static is studied. As previously empirically verified, it is shown that the measurements have log-normal distribution even in idealistic environments, which cannot be explained using log-normal shadow fading arguments. Quantization and round-off errors induced by different measurement system components are also considered, and their impact are analyzed. As a result, it is shown that the logarithmic received signal strength measurements under static channel conditions are samples from stationary Gaussian process independent of the environment. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Low-data-rate wireless networks can be deployed for physical intrusion detection and localization purposes. The intrusion of a physical object (or human) will disrupt the radio-frequency magnetic field and can be detected by observing the change in radio attenuation. This gives the basis for the radio tomographic imaging technology, which has recently been developed for passively monitoring and tracking objects. Due to noise and the lack of knowledge about the number and the sizes of intruding objects, multiobject intrusion detection and localization is a challenging issue. This paper proposes an extended variational Bayesian Gaussian mixture model (VB-GMM) algorithm in treating this problem. The extended VB-GMM algorithm applies a Gaussian mixture model to model the changed radio attenuation in a monitored field due to the intrusion of an unknown number of objects and uses a modified version of the variational Bayesian approach for model estimation. Real-world data from both outdoor and indoor experiments (using the radio tomographic imaging technology) have been used to verify the high accuracy and the robustness of the proposed multiobject localization algorithm. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]