An Improved Multi-Sensor Geolocation Method Using Periodic Constraint With Incomplete TOA Measurements

Limited by the beam scanning characteristics of the emitter, it is usually difficult for multiple receivers to achieve good reception of the same emitter target at the same time. This brings difficulties to multi-sensor time difference of arrival (TDOA) localization. Recent research shows that by introducing the constraint of signal periodicity, high-precision localization can be achieved under incomplete measurements. However, this method does not make full use of all observations, and its heuristic strategy increases the complexity and uncertainty of the algorithm. In this paper, an improved multi-sensor geolocation method is proposed, which makes full use of all the observations and has better positioning accuracy than the traditional methods. In addition, for signals without periodicity, the proposed method can be directly converted into the classical multi-sensor TDOA geolocation method, instead of reprocessing. Theoretical analysis and numerical simulation show that the proposed method achieves better performance than the traditional method.