Localization Method of Wide-Area Distribution Multistatic Sky-Wave Over-the-Horizon Radar

In this letter, a model of wide-area distribution multistatic
$\text{T}^{M}$
-
$\text{R}^{N}$
(
$M$
independent transmitters and
$N$
independent receivers) sky-wave over-the-horizon radar (WDMS-OTHR) is investigated. A localization algorithm that utilizes the hill-climbing algorithm based on the weighted least squares (HC-WLS) method for this model is also proposed. The localization algorithm mainly includes three stages. First, the geodetic coordinate of station position is transformed into the spatial rectangular coordinate. Second, the initial position is estimated by WLS that forms a pseudolinear equation from the measurements of the time of arrival (TOA) and introduces nuisance variables as additional unknowns. Third, the spatial rectangular coordinate of the initial position is transformed into the geodetic coordinate, and the initial position is optimized by HC that performs eight neighborhood searches around the initial position and adopts multiple iteration searches until the optimal position is obtained. Numerical simulations demonstrate that the positioning accuracy of the proposed algorithm is better than WLS.