Particle swarm optimization for time-difference-of-arrival based localization

Time-difference-of-arrival (TDOA) based source localization has been intensively studied and broadly applied in many fields. In this paper, particle swarm optimization (PSO) is employed for positioning with TDOA measurements in the circumstances of known and unknown propagation speed. The optimization criterion is first developed and the PSO technique is then employed to search the global minimum of the cost function. For sufficiently small noise conditions, simulation results show that the PSO approach provides accurate source location estimation for both known and unknown propagation speed, and also gives an efficient speed estimate in the later case.