One-Bit Direct Position Determination of Narrowband Gaussian Signals

One of the main drawbacks of the well-known Direct Position Determination (DPD) method is the requirement that raw data be transferred to a common processor. It would therefore be of high practical value if DPD—or a modified version thereof—could be successfully applied to a coarsely quantized version of the raw data, thus alleviating the communication requirements between the different base stations. Motivated by the above, and inspired by recent work in the rejuvenated one-bit array processing field, we present One-Bit DPD: a direct localization method based on one-bit quantized measurements. We show that despite the coarse quantization, the proposed method nonetheless yields a position estimate with appealing asymptotic properties. We further establish the identifiability conditions of this model, which rely only on second-order statistics. Simulation results corroborate our analytical derivations, demonstrating that much of the information regarding the emitter position is preserved under this crude form of quantization.