Improvement of software defined radio based TDOA source localization

In this paper, methods to improve a practical Time Difference of Arrival (TDOA) based source localization system are investigated. Firstly, our previous work on the development of a TDOA based source localization system using reconfigurable Software Defined Radios (SDRs) is described in detail. The system can achieve less than 100m error in a coverage of several kilometers. However, the performance of the localization system is limited by many factors. In order to further improve the localization accuracy, a method to improve the resolution of TDOA measurements is proposed; and by investigating the synchronization error and sensor position error through experiments, their error distributions are obtained to reduce measurement error. When the measurement accuracy reaches a limit constrained by current hardware platforms, localization optimization algorithms are implemented. Instead of proving the effectiveness of the algorithms through simulation, all numerical results are obtained from real-world experiments and the results show great enhancement of the localization accuracy.