Enhanced Moving Source Localization with Time and Frequency Difference of Arrival: Motion-Assisted Method for Sub-Dimensional Sensor Networks

Abstract

Localizing a moving source by Time Difference of Arrival (TDOA) and Frequency Difference of Arrival (FDOA) commonly requires at least N+1 sensors in N-dimensional space to obtain more than N pairs of TDOAs and FDOAs, thereby establishing more than 2N equations to solve for 2N unknowns. However, if there are insufficient sensors, the localization problem will become underdetermined, leading to non-unique solutions or inaccuracies in the minimum norm solution. This paper proposes a localization method using TDOAs and FDOAs while incorporating the motion model. The motion between the source and sensors increases the equivalent length of the baseline, thereby improving observability even when using the minimum number of sensors. The problem is formulated as a Maximum Likelihood Estimation (MLE) and solved through Gauss–Newton (GN) iteration. Since GN requires an initialization close to the true value, the MLE is transformed into a semidefinite programming problem using Semidefinite Relaxation (SDR) technology, while SDR results in a suboptimal estimate, it is sufficient as an initialization to guarantee the convergence of GN iteration. The proposed method is analytically shown to reach the Cramér–Rao Lower Bound (CRLB) accuracy under mild noise conditions. Simulation results confirm that it achieves CRLB-level performance when the number of sensors is lower than N+1, thereby corroborating the theoretical analysis.