Signal Source Positioning Based on Angle-Only Measurements in Passive Sensor Networks

Abstract

Some passive sensors can measure only directions of arrival of signals, but the real positions of signal sources are often desirable, which can be estimated by combining distributed passive sensors as a network. However, passive observations should be correctly associated first. This paper studies the multi-target data association and signal localization problem in distributed passive sensor networks. With angle-only measurements from distributed passive sensors, multiple lines in a 3-dimensional (3D) scenario can be built and then those that will intersect in a small volume in 3D are classified into the same source. The center of the small volume is taken as an estimate of the signal source position, whose statistical distributions are formulated. If the minimum distance is less than an association threshold, then two lines are considered to be from the same signal source. In numerical results, the impacts of angle measurement accuracy and platform self-positioning accuracy are analyzed, indicating that this method can achieve a prescribed data association rate and a high positioning performance with a low computation cost.

Three-Dimensional Signal Source Localization with Angle-Only Measurements in Passive Sensor Networks

“…In [11], the minimum distance between two lines is used to solve the distance parameters of the two lines. In this part, we extend the algorithm such that the distance parameters α = [α 1 , .…”

“…, M, respectively. Each angle-only measurement corresponds only to one member of the set M. In our previous work [11], we constructed a test statistic using the minimum distance between the lines formed by the angle-only measurements of different sensors and then achieved the data association of the angle-only measurements. Then, we can obtain a mapping ψ : L → M, which represents that any element in L corresponds to a unique element in M. Therefore, after data association, the index set L can be divided into M + 1 disjoint set, denoted as B 0 , B 1 , .…”

“…Generally speaking, the types of passive sensors' measurements include time delay (TD), Doppler shift (DS), angle of arrival (AOA), angle rate, or their combinations [6,7]. Among them, signal source localization with angle-only measurements has attracted considerable attention for many years, and it has been applied in many fields, including radar, sonar, navigation, and communications [8][9][10][11]. The signal source position cannot be obtained by the angle-only measurement in one snapshot with one passive sensor.…”

“…The small volume is determined by the level of the measurement noise. In [11], following this concept, a test statistic is constructed using the distance between the lines formed by angle-only measurements to complete the data association of angle-only measurements from different sensors.…”

“…It is a natural generalization of the LS method [14,20]. In addition, the signal source position can also be estimated based on the spatial relationship between the source position and the lines formed by angle-only measurements [11,[21][22][23].…”