Multi-station joint localization has important practical significance. In this paper, phase difference of arrival (PDOA) information is introduced into the joint time difference of arrival (TDOA) and frequency difference of arrival (FDOA) localization method to improve the target localization accuracy. First, the Cramer–Rao lower bound (CRLB) of the joint TDOA, FDOA and PDOA localization approach with multi-station precise phase synchronization is derived. Then, the CRLB of the joint TDOA, FDOA and differential PDOA (dPDOA) localization method for the case of phase asynchronization between observation stations is also presented. Furthermore, the authors analyze the influence of the phase wrapping problem on localization accuracy and propose solutions to solve the phase wrapping problem based on cost functions of grid search. Finally, iterative localization algorithms based on maximum likelihood (ML) are proposed for both TDOA/FDOA/PDOA and TDOA/FDOA/dPDOA scenarios, respectively. Simulation results demonstrate the localization performance of the proposed approaches.

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