One-Bit Direct Position Determination of Narrowband Gaussian Signals

Abstract: One of the main drawbacks of the well-known Direct Position Determination (DPD) method is the requirement that raw signal data be transferred to a common processor. It would therefore be of high practical value if DPD$-$or a modified version thereof$-$could be successfully applied to a coarsely quantized version of the raw data, thus alleviating the requirements on the communication links between the different base stations. Motivated by the above, and inspired by recent work in the rejuvenated one-bit array processing field, we present One-Bit DPD: a method for direct localization based on one-bit quantized measurements. We show that despite the coarse quantization, the proposed method nonetheless yields an estimate for the unknown emitter position with appealing asymptotic properties. We further establish the underlying identifiability conditions of this model, which rely only on second-order statistics. Empirical simulation results corroborate our analytical derivations, demonstrating that much of the information regarding the unknown emitter position is preserved under this crude form of quantization.