Joint time delay and frequency estimation without eigen-decomposition

Abstract

In this letter, we addressed the problem of estimating the time delay and the frequencies of noisy sinusoidal signals received at two spatially separated sensors. We employ the Propagator Method (PM) in conjunction with the well-known MUSIC/ root-MUSIC algorithm; the proposed method would generate estimates of the unknown parameters. Such estimates are based on the observation and/or covariance matrices. Moreover, the PM does not require the eigenvalue decomposition (EVD) or singular value decomposition (SVD) of the cross-spectral matrix (CSM) of received signals; therefore, a significant improvement in computational load is achieved. Computer simulations are also included to demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed method.