Different perspective of time difference of arrival averaging

Any emitter can be positioned using three or more receivers in two dimensional planes and four or more receivers in three dimensional planes. The transmitter signal reaches at the receivers that synchronized each other's in different times. Using this time differences of arrival (TDOAs) hyperbolic lines of positions (LOPs) are defined and target is positioned at the intersection of LOPs. It is well known that in the absence of noise, the sum of the TDOAs which produces a closed loop considered as zero. This rule is the basic idea of the TDOA Averaging (TDOAA) method. TDOAA significantly decreases the estimation error and improves the accuracy of positioning. In this study a different perspective has been introduced for TDOAA by proposing a simple graph traversal algorithm in order to produce coefficient matrix. The effect of TDOAA on the TDOAs estimation error is also investigated.