TOA-Based Source Localization: A Linearization Approach Adopting Coordinate System Translation

This paper addresses the localization of a timing signal source based on the time of arrival (TOA) measurements that are collected from nearby sensors that are position known and synchronized to each other. Generally speaking, for such TOA-based source localization, the corresponding observation equations contain nonlinear relationship between measurements and unknown parameters, which normally results in the nonexistence of any efficient unbiased estimator that attains the Cramer-Rao lower bound (CRLB). In this paper, we devise a new approach that utilizes linearization and adopts suitable coordinate system translation to eliminate nonlinearity from the converted observation equations. The performance analysis and simulation study conducted show that our proposed algorithm can achieve the CRLB when the zero-mean Gaussian and independent measurement errors are sufficiently small. © 2013 Shunyuan Sun et al.