Localization of multiple disjoint sources with prior knowledge on source locations in the presence of sensor location errors

Sensor location errors are known to be able to degrade the source localization accuracy significantly. This paper considers the problem of localizing multiple disjoint sources where prior knowledge on the source locations is available to mitigate the effect of sensor location uncertainty. The error in the priorly known source location is assumed to follow a zero-mean Gaussian distribution. When a source location is completely unknown, the covariance matrix of its prior location would go to infinity. The localization of multiple disjoint sources is achieved through exploring the time difference of arrival (TDOA) and the frequency difference of arrival (FDOA) measurements. In this work, we derive the Cramér–Rao lower bound (CRLB) of the source location estimates. The CRLB is shown analytically to be able to unify several CRLBs introduced in literature. We next compare the localization performance when multiple source locations are determined jointly and individually. In the presence of sensor location errors, the superiority of joint localization of multiple sources in terms of greatly improved localization accuracy is established. Two methods for localizing multiple disjoint sources are proposed, one for the case where only some sources have prior location information and the other for the scenario where all sources have prior location information. Both algorithms can reach the CRLB accuracy when sensor location errors are small. Simulations corroborate the theoretical developments.