The joint estimation of differential delay, Doppler, and phase (Corresp.)

In radio and sonar applications it sometimes happens that narrow-band signals, originated from a remote source and observed at a pair of receivers, differ by unknown differential phase and Doppler shift in addition to the differential delay corresponding to the range difference. The correspondence presents the joint maximum likelihood (ML) estimate of the differential delay, Doppler, and phase and examines their accuracy by deriving the Cramér-Rao bound. It is shown that the joint ML estimators are the values of the delay and Doppler that maximize the magnitude of a generalized ambiguity function analogous to the one used in radar. It is also shown that for long observation time and high enough signal-to-noise ratio there is no degradation in the accuracy of the time-delay estimator due to the additional phase and Doppler uncertainty and that the differential Doppler is uncorrelated with the differential delay and phase estimators.