Efficient Position Determination of Multiple Emitters

Abstract

An efficient algorithm for estimating the positions of multiple emitters by widely separated arrays is proposed. Based on the Maximum Likelihood principle, the position of each emitter is decoupled from the other emitters, and in each iteration, it is determined by a two dimensional grid search. This approach substantially reduces the computation load of a straightforward implementation of the Maximum Likelihood estimator, which requires a multidimensional search. Simulation results demonstrate that convergence is achieved with only a small number of iterations. The results are compared with the Cramér-Rao Bound.