Characterization of ADC Sampling Rate on the UV TDOA Positioning with PMT Photon-Level Receiver

We investigate the effect of Analog-To-Digital Converter (ADC) sampling rate on the synchronization and positioning error under ultra-violet (UV) photon-level detection. Taking into account the response pulse of the current photomultiplier tube (PMT) devices to incident UV photons, we investigate the photon-level synchronization error both numerically and experimentally. It is shown that increasing the analog-to-digital converter (ADC) sampling rate to 200 MHz results in significant positioning accuracy improvement, achieving a good balance between synchronization accuracy and hardware cost. From both 2-dimensional and 3-dimensional time-difference-of-arrival (TDOA) positioning simulations, increasing the ADC sampling rate to 200 MHz leads to enhanced positioning accuracy. The gain of further increasing the sampling rate to 500 MHz becomes less noticeable.