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Source localization plays a key role in many applications including radar, wireless and underwater communications. Among various localization methods, the most popular ones are Time-Of-Arrival (TOA), Time-Difference-Of-Arrival (TDOA), and Received Signal Strength (RSS) based. Since the Cram\'{e}r-Rao lower bounds (CRLB) of these methods depend on the sensor geometry explicitly, sensor placement becomes a crucial issue in source localization applications. In this paper, we consider finding the optimal sensor placements for the TOA, TDOA and RSS based localization scenarios. We first unify the three localization models by a generalized problem formulation based on the CRLB-related metric. Then a unified optimization framework for optimal sensor placement (UTMOST) is developed through the combination of the alternating direction method of multipliers (ADMM) and majorization-minimization (MM) techniques. Unlike the majority of the state-of-the-art works, the proposed UTMOST neither approximates the design criterion nor considers only uncorrelated noise in the measurements. It can readily adapt to to different design criteria (i.e. A, D and E-optimality) with slight modifications within the framework and yield the optimal sensor placements correspondingly. Extensive numerical experiments are performed to exhibit the efficacy and flexibility of the proposed framework.

In this letter, we revisit the problem of maximum likelihood estimation (MLE) of parameters of Gaussian Mixture Model (GMM) and show a new derivation for its parameters. The new derivation, unlike the classical approach employing the technique of expectation-maximization (EM), is straightforward and doesn't invoke any hidden or latent variables and calculation of the conditional density function. The new derivation is based on the approach of minorization-maximization and involves finding a tighter lower bound of the log-likelihood criterion. The update steps of the parameters, obtained via the new derivation, are same as the update steps obtained via the classical EM algorithm.

This paper proposes a novel algorithm to determine the optimal placement of redundant inertial sensors such as accelerometers and gyroscopes (gyros) for increasing the sensing accuracy. In this paper, we have proposed a novel iterative algorithm to find the optimal sensor configuration. The proposed algorithm utilizes the majorization-minimization (MM) algorithm and the duality principle to find the optimal configuration. Unlike the state-of-the-art which are mainly geometrical in nature and restricted to certain noise statistics, the proposed algorithm gives the exact positions of the sensors, and moreover, the proposed algorithm is independent of the nature of the noise at different sensors. The proposed alogrithm has been implemented and tested via numerical simulation in the MATLAB. The simulation results show that the algorithm converges to the optimal configurations and show the effectiveness of the proposed algorithm.