Passive multi-sensor single-target tracking with highly constrained unidirectional communication

An effective way of overcoming the observability problem in single sensor passive tracking is to fuse information from multiple passive sensors. However, new challenges arise from the fact that sensor information must be transmitted between sensors, often over severely limited communication channels. In this paper, we address the issue of how such communication channels can be used to greatest effect when tracking a single target with multiple bearings-only sensors. One approach to saving bandwidth is to only transmit highly quantised data instead of data with high numerical precision. We consider the effect that this quantisation has on two common fusion architectures; measurement fusion and track-to-track fusion, in order to determine which approach is superior under various levels of communication constraint.