Ambiguity resolution in RSS-based emitter geolocation

The concept of using received signal strength (RSS) measurements from spatially dispersed RSS sensors for emitter geolocation has attracted considerable interest due to its implementation simplicity. However, there remains a need to better understand the underlying mechanisms that sometimes result in anomalously poor geolocation performance, even with high quality RSS information. An important aspect of this problem concerns the complex dependence of the emitter geolocation accuracy on the relative positions of the RSS sensors with respect to the emitter, i.e., the emitter-sensor geometry. This paper discusses the problem of ambiguities arising from the emitter-sensor geometry in RSS-based geolocation systems and shows that angle of arrival (AOA) information from a single direction finding (DF) sensor can substantially improve the robustness of RSS-based geolocation algorithms in some scenarios.