Localization of Transmitters and Scatterers by Single Receiver

Abstract

Localization by single receiver is attractive in practice. This paper exploits the additional propagation paths from scatterers for the localization of transmitters, using the time differences of arrival between the direct and scattered signals and their angles of arrival observed at the receiver. Localization is possible only if there are at least two transmitters and at least two scatterers, which may not happen in a real scenario. We explore the utilization of intentional transmitter or scatterer at known position to assist in the localization, thereby enabling localization with arbitrary number of transmitters or scatterers. The challenge for this problem is that the positions of the unintentional scatterers are not known and they need to be estimated in conjunction with the transmitter positions. A non-iterative localization algorithm based on the integration of several minimal measurement solutions is proposed, with the analysis in supporting the Cramer-Rao Lower Bound performance for Gaussian noise over the small error region. The optimum placement of single intentional transmitter is derived for the 2-D and 3-D scenarios, as well as for single intentional scatterer. Simulation confirms the expected performance of the proposed positioning solution and validates the optimum placement.