A direct position determination method with combined TDOA and FDOA based on particle filter

The localization of a stationary transmitter using moving receivers is considered. The original Direct Position Determination (DPD) methods, with combined Time Difference of Arrival (TDOA) and Frequency Difference of Arrival (FDOA), do not perform well under low Signal-to-Noise Ratio (SNR), and worse still, the computation cost is difficult to accept when the computational capabilities are limited. To get better positioning performance, we present a new DPD algorithm that proves to be more computationally efficient and more precise for weak signals than the conventional approach. The algorithm partitions the signal received with the same receiver into multiple non-overlapping short-time signal segments, and then uses the TDOA, the FDOA and the coherency among the short-time signals to locate the target. The fast maximum likelihood estimation, one iterative method based on particle filter, is designed to solve the problem of high computation load. A secondary but important result is a derivation of closed-form expressions of the Cramer-Rao Lower Bound (CRLB). The simulation results show that the algorithm proposed in this paper outperforms the traditional DPD algorithms with more accurate results and higher computational efficiency, and especially at low SNR, it is more close to the CRLB.