A multiple narrowband emitters geolocation algorithm based on AOA estimations

The Problem of non-cooperative narrowband sources location is often solved by estimating many parameters, among them one can cite the angle of arrival (AOA), the time of arrival (TOA) or the frequency of arrival (FOA). To the best of our knowledge most of the techniques are using separately estimated location parameters on several stations. Since they do not take into account that the observed signals on the stations comes from the same emitters, they are suboptimal. They lead to ambiguïties especially in multi-emitter context. Based on the narrowband assumption on the whole sensor network, composed of the multiple base stations, the proposed method relies on a centralised processing by means of a stacked observation vector. As we simultaneously treat all the signals collected in several stations, the corresponding criterion treats all stations together and does not exhibit ambiguities in presence of multiple emitters. For the sake of simplicity, we will consider in this paper only two stations. After having described the implementation of our algorithm, simulations and Cramér-Rao Bounds illustrate the improvement of our method compared to a classical AOA estimation based algorithm performed on each station independently.