An electronic warfare perspective on time difference of arrival estimation subject to radio receiver imperfections

Sammanfattning: In order to ensure secure communication in digital military radio systems, multiple methods are used to protect the transmission from being intercepted by enemy electronic warfare systems. An intercepted transmission can be used to estimate several parameters of the transmitted signal such as its origin (position or direction) and of course the transmitted message itself. The methods used in traditional electronic warfare direction-finding systems have in general poor performance against wideband low power signals while the considered correlation-based time-difference of arrival (TDOA) methods show promising results.The output from a TDOA-based direction-finding system using two spatially separated receivers is the TDOA for the signal between the receiving sensors which uniquely describes a hyperbolic curve and the emitter is located somewhere along this curve. In order to measure a TDOA between two digital radio receivers both receiver systems must have the same time and frequency references to avoid degradation due to reference imperfections. However, in some cases, the receivers are separated up to 1000 km and can not share a common reference. This is solved by using a reference module at each of the receiver sites and high accuracy is achieved using the NAVSTAR-GPS system but, still, small differences between the outputs of the different reference modules occurs which degrades the performance of the system.In a practical electronic warfare system there is a number of factors that degrade the performance of the system, such as non-ideal antennas, analog receiver filter differences, and the analog to digital converter errors. In this thesis we concentrate on the problems which arises from imperfections in the reference modules, such as time and frequency errors.