A new approach to decentralized array processing

The problem of of decentralizing the processing in a passive array composed of subarrays at geographically dispersed sites is addressed. A new scheme, based on obtaining estimates of the covariance matrices from each subarray is presented, and its performance is compared to the conventional triangulation method. It is shown that the new scheme offers improved accuracy with only a modest increase in the communication load. Moreover, unlike the conventional triangulation scheme, it does not require any data association step; the data association is done automaticly in the proposed algorithm.