Analysis of TDOA and TDOA/SS based geolocation techniques in a non-line-of-sight environment

The performance analysis of wireless geolocation in a non-line-of-sight (NLOS) environment is a very important issue. Since Cramer-Rao lower bound (CRLB) determines the physical impossibility of the variance of an unbiased estimator being less than the bound, many studies presented the performance analysis in terms of CRLB. Several CRLBs for time-of-arrival (TOA), pseudo-range TOA, angle-of-arrival (AOA), and signal strength (SS) based positioning methods have been derived for NLOS environment. However, the performance analysis of time difference of arrival (TDOA) and TDOA/SS based geolocation techniques in a NLOS environment is still an opening issue. This paper derives the CRLBs of TDOA and TDOA/SS based positioning methods for NLOS environment. In addition, theoretical analysis proves that the derived CRLB for TDOA is the same as that of pseudo-range TOA and the TDOA/SS scheme has a lower CRLB than the TDOA (or SS) scheme.