TDoA for Passive Localization: Underwater versus Terrestrial Environment

The measurement of an emitter's position using electronic support passive sensors is termed passive localization and plays an important part both in electronic support and electronic attack. The emitting target could be in terrestrial or underwater environment. In this paper, we propose a time difference of arrival (TDoA) algorithm for passive localization in underwater and terrestrial environment. In terrestrial environment, it is assumed that a Rician flat fading model should be used because there exists line of sight. In underwater environment, we apply a modified UWB Saleh-Valenzuela (S-V) model to characterize the underwater acoustic fading channel. We propose the TDoA finding algorithm via estimating the delay of two correlated channels, and compare it with the existing approach. Simulations were conducted for terrestrial and underwater environment, and simulation results show that our TDoA algorithm performs much better than the cross-correlation-based TDoA algorithm with a lower level of magnitude in terms of average TDoA error and root-mean-square error (RMSE). Compared to the TDoA performance in terrestrial environment, the TDoA performance in underwater environment is much worse. This is because the underwater channel has clusters and rays, which introduces memory and uncertainties. For the two scenarios in underwater environment, the performance in rich scattering underwater environment is worse than that in less scattering underwater environment, because the latter has less clusters and rays, which would cause less uncertainties in TDoA.