A Theoretical Analysis of 2D Sensor Arrays for TDOA Based Localization

In source localization from time difference of arrival, the impact of the sensor array geometry to the localization accuracy is not well understood yet. A first rigorous analysis can be found in B. Yang and J. Scheuing (2005). It derived sufficient and necessary conditions for optimum array geometry in terms of minimum Cramer-Rao bound. This paper continues the above work and studies theoretically the localization accuracy of two-dimensional sensor arrays. It addresses different issues: a) optimum vs. uniform angular array b) near-field vs. far-field array c) using all sensor pairs vs. those with a common reference sensor as required from spherical position estimators. The paper ends up with some new insights into the sensor placement problem