Delay and Doppler Induced Direct Tracking by Particle Filter

The geolocation and tracking of a moving transmitter using receivers mounted on stationary or moving platforms is considered. Two-step conventional methods measure time difference of arrivals (TDOA) and differential Doppler in the first step, and in the second step use these measurements for geolocation and tracking. We explore a particle filter that uses the received radio signal directly in order to determine the location and velocity of the transmitter. Two algorithms are derived for the case of unknown deterministic signals and for the case of unknown Gaussian signals. In addition we derive recursive performance bounds for the two cases. The proposed methods show better performance than two-step methods at low signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) values and achieve the performance bound at high SNR values.