Wireless source localization based on time of arrival measurement

Abstract

Wireless source localization has found a number of applications in wireless sensor networks. In this work, we investigate source localization based on the practical time of arrival (TOA) measurement model. Unlike most existing works that transform TOA measurement into time differences before processing, we consider the original measurement model and investigate three methods for direct source localization. We also derive the Cramer-Rao lower bound (CRLB) under the TOA model and establish its connection with the CRLB under the more commonly used time-difference of arrival (TDOA) signal model. We present results that illustrate the performance advantage of source localization based on the original TOA model over the commonly used TDOA pre-processing.