Distributed passive localization with asynchronous receivers based on expectation maximization

In this paper, we study the time of arrival (TOA)-based distributed passive localization in asynchronous wireless network. Performing synchronization between receivers before target localization is possible but costs extra energy and bandwidth. To this end, We propose an expectation maximization (EM) algorithm to locate the passive target in the presence of receivers' clock offsets. To improve the robustness of the proposed algorithm, we employ the average consensus scheme to obtain the location of target at each receiver in a distributed way. A quadratic polynomial approximation is proposed to reduce the communication overhead and computational complexity. To evaluate the performance of the proposed algorithm, the Cramer-Rao bound (CRB) of the target's position estimation is derived. Simulation results show that the proposed distributed EM algorithm performs close to the centralized counterpart. It outperforms the conventional two step estimation method and the one based on time difference of arrival. Moreover, the proposed algorithm can attain the derived CRB, which demonstrates the effectiveness of the algorithm.