Performance analysis of wavefront curvature methods for range estimation of a moving source

In numerous practical situations a large array of sensors is required, especially for improving the system ability to detect and track moving sources. However, the array performance is strongly affected by the lack of stationarity of the impinging signals. The use of a large array of sensors allow us to perform the source localization by using the wavefront curvature. The analysis of the range estimates based on the wavefront curvature have been thoroughly performed by various authors but, to our knowledge, is restricted to the case of fixed sources. The study of the effects of source motion for range estimation (Section III) and source detection (Section V) constitutes an important part of this work. This study reveals that the array performance can be far from the expected values, especially for large array. Therefore, the robustness of a direct processing of the whole sensor array is very questionable. The computational burden constitutes another serious drawback of this (direct) approach. The use of partitioned processings (Sections IV and VI) seems thus quite promising even if (and perhaps because) it is not optimal so as to fulfil the computation cost and robustness requirements. The performance of such processings for estimating the range of moving sources is presented.<>