Performance Analysis of Direct Position Determination for Emitter Source Positioning

This paper presents the investigation of performance of Direct Position Determination (DPD) method for emitter source positioning. Single and multiple emitter cases are studied with different system geometries, array configurations and different emitter locations. MUSIC and Maximum likelihood algorithm are used to process received data and find out possible regions where emitters are. A simple searching method is then applied to reduce errors and find out the final estimated positions. From the results, we can see that DPD performs quite well at high Signal-to-Noise ratio (SNR). However at low SNR, system geometries and antenna configurations will have apparent effect on the performance. In multiple emitter case, there is a minimum distance limit between emitters for DPD to clearly separate them. When emitter signal is hidden by other emitters, DPD performance degrades.