The Price of Anarchy in Active Signal Landscape Map Building

Multiple receivers with a priori knowledge about their own initial states are assumed to be dropped in an unknown environment comprising multiple signals of opportunity (SOPs) transmitters. The receivers draw pseudorange observations from the SOPs. The receivers’ objective is to build a high-fidelity signal landscape map of the environment, which would enable the receivers to navigate accurately with the aid of the SOPs. The receivers could command their own maneuvers and such commands are computed so to maximize the information gathered about the SOPs in a greedy fashion. Several information fusion and decision making architectures are possible. This paper studies the price of anarchy in building signal landscape maps to assess the degradation in the map quality should the receivers produce their own maps and make their own maneuver decisions versus a completely centralized approach. In addition, a hierarchical architecture is proposed in which the receivers build their own maps and make their own decisions, but share relevant information. Such architecture is shown to produce maps of comparable quality to the completely centralized approach.