Modified Cramér-Rao lower bound for TOA and symbol width estimation. An application to search and rescue signals

Victor Bissoli Nicolau (1, 2) , Martial Coulon (1, 3) , Yoann Grégoire (4) , Thibaud Calmettes (5) , Jean-Yves Tourneret (1, 3)

1 IRIT-SC - Signal et Communications
2 TéSA - Télécommunications Spatiales et Aéronautiques - Telecommunications for Space ant Aeronautics
3 Toulouse INP - Institut National Polytechnique (Toulouse)
4 CNES - Centre National d'Études Spatiales [Toulouse]
5 THALES [France]

This paper focuses on the performance of time of arrival estimators for distress beacon signals which are defined by pulses with smooth transitions. These signals are used in the satellite-based search and rescue Cospas-Sarsat system. We propose a signal model based on sigmoidal functions. Closed-form expressions for the modified Cramér-Rao bounds associated with the parameters of this model are derived. The obtained expressions are easy to interpret since they analytically depend on the system parameters. Simulations conducted on realistic search and rescue signals show good agreement with the theoretical results.

Mots clés: Cospas-Sarsat; Time of arrival; Edge detection; Symbol width; Modified Cramer-Rao bound

Domaines: Synthèse d'image et réalité virtuelle [cs.GR]; Traitement du signal et de l'image [eess.SP]; Traitement des images [eess.IV]; Vision par ordinateur et reconnaissance de formes [cs.CV]; Intelligence artificielle [cs.AI]

Victor Bissoli Nicolau, Martial Coulon, Yoann Grégoire, Thibaud Calmettes, Jean-Yves Tourneret. Modified Cramér-Rao lower bound for TOA and symbol width estimation. An application to search and rescue signals. IEEE International Conference on Acoustics, Speech, and Signal Processing - ICASSP 2013, May 2013, Vancouver, Canada. pp. 5160-5164. ⟨hal-01148626⟩