Ultraviolet positioning via TDOA: error analysis and system prototype

This work performs the design, real-time hardware realization, and experimental evaluation of a positioning system by ultra-violet (UV) communication under photon-level signal detection. The positioning is based on the time-difference of arrival (TDOA) principle. Time division-based transmission of synchronization sequence from three transmitters with known positions is applied. We investigate the positioning error by decomposing it into two parts, the transmitter-side timing error and the receiver-side synchronization error. The theoretical average error matches well with the simulation results, which indicates that theoretical fitting can provide reliable guidance and prediction for hardware experiments. We also conduct real-time hardware realization of the TDOA-based positioning system using field programmable gate array (FPGA), which is experimentally evaluated via outdoor experiments. Experimental results match well with the theoretical and simulation results.