Research on Distributed Synthetic Aperture Passive Positioning and Optimal Geometric Configuration

Synthetic aperture passive positioning (SAPP) has gradually become a hot spot in radiation source location research. However, there are relatively few studies on three-dimensional synthetic aperture passive positioning methods. Moreover, synthetic aperture passive positioning is significantly affected by residual frequency offsets (RFO) resulting from noncooperative operation between transceivers. To address the challenges, a distributed synthetic aperture passive positioning method is proposed. Considering frequency synchronization among platforms, this method leverages the SAPP algorithm to obtain high-precision slant angles. Subsequently, it formulates positioning equations related to the 3D target position and RFO. The distributed geometric configuration is studied under certain constraints, and the analytical solutions for the optimal configuration are obtained. Space-borne simulations illustrate that the positioning accuracy of the proposed method is an order of magnitude higher compared to that of the FOA, FDOA, and DOA methods. Additionally, airborne experiments indicate that in the presence of RFO, the proposed method improves the positioning accuracy by two orders of magnitude and exhibits strong convergence properties.