Fast Location Algorithm Based on an Extended Symmetry Nested Sensor Model in an Intelligent Transportation System

Vehicle positioning has played an important role in intelligent transportation systems. Previous research has had difficulties in increasing the sensor aperture and reducing the computational complexity of the vehicle positioning algorithm. This paper proposes a new sensor model to extend the sensor aperture, which is similar to the nested sensor model combined with fourth-order cumulants. The proposed algorithm estimates the number of vehicles, which is much higher than the actual number of sensors. An ideal characteristic equation-based method is used to avoid the use of eigenvalue decomposition and spectrum peak search, thereby greatly reducing the computation complexity. In addition, the weighted coefficient matrix is introduced for optimization. Theoretical analysis and simulation results show that the proposed algorithm has lower computational complexity, avoids 2-D parameter matching, and has a high utilization of arrays while still ensuring accurate parameter estimation.