Solving Multi-path Time Delay Estimation Problem in the Presence of Additive White Gaussian Noise Using a Genetic-Algorithm

In practical world, there always exist problems of multi-path time delay estimation (MTDE) and it is an important problem in the fields of sonar, radar, digital communication and geophysics. We consider the problem of estimating the arrival times of overlapping ocean-acoustic signals from a noisy received waveform that consists of attenuated and delayed replicas of a known transient signal. We assume that the transmitted signal and the number of paths in the multipath environment are known. Many existing time-delay estimation algorithms perform poorly due to converging to local optimum points. In this paper, an efficient genetic-algorithm (GA) is applied to deal with the above problem. To the best of our knowledge this study is the first attempt to solve time delay estimation (TDE) using an evolutionary technique, genetic-algorithms. The performance of generic-algorithm is examined for different signal-noise scenarios. Our simulation results show that the time delays are estimated well based on the genetic-algorithm.