A location system using asynchronous distributed sensors

This paper describes a location system using an asynchronous distributed sensor network. The sensors´ clocks operate independently and are not explicitly synchronized. The motion of the source, or the object, between two emitted pulses will cause the inter-arrival time of these two pulses at each sensor to vary. This inter-arrival time is a function of the source location and motion and is independent of the clock offsets among sensors. Thus, the independently calculated time-difference-of-arrival (TDOA) of successive pulses at each sensor provides a reliable source of information to estimate the source position as well as its motion. The Cramer-Rao lower bound (CRLB) is derived to assess the performance of the proposed method and to show that its performance can approach that of a synchronous network given a sufficient number of sensors and moderate source movement. Some sub-optimal but effective source trajectory tracking methods are proposed which further relax the assumption of source motion between consecutive pulses. The simulation results show that the proposed estimation and tracking methods are quite good.