INFORMATION TECHNOLOGY FOR ACOUSTIC OBJECT TRACKING USING ASYNCHRONOUS TDOA/FDOA LOCALIZATION METHOD

DOI: 10.31673/2412-4338.2026.019004

Abstract

The article considers the urgent scientific and applied problem of acoustic tracking of high-speed moving objects (in particular, unmanned aerial vehicles) in geographically distributed wireless sensor networks. The main obstacle to the implementation of such systems based on low-cost microcontrollers is the lack of strict hardware time synchronization, which leads to significant errors in calculating spatial coordinates. Existing localization methods are analyzed, and their vulnerability to clock drift and limited communication channel bandwidth is identified. To address these shortcomings, a comprehensive information technology has been developed that combines algorithmic compensation of asynchrony and network optimization. An improved method of joint TDOA/FDOA (Time and Frequency Difference of Arrival) localization based on the use of a modified extended Kalman filter (EKF) is proposed. The specific feature of the algorithm is the integration of asynchrony parameters (initial time offset and linear frequency drift) directly into the system's state vector, which allows for joint estimation of target kinematics and network synchronization in real time. In addition, the system architecture based on the Edge Computing concept is justified. An energy-efficient adaptive data transmission strategy and information compression algorithms at the edge node level (dynamic quantization of FFT spectral features, Delta-Encoding of timestamps) are proposed. This allows for a radical reduction in network traffic, avoiding the continuous transmission of raw audio data, which is critically important for autonomous battery-powered systems. The proposed comprehensive approach solves the scalability problem and allows for the deployment of reliable security perimeters based on affordable commercial off-the-shelf components. The effectiveness of the developed algorithmic and architectural solutions is fully confirmed by the results of simulation modeling..

Keywords: acoustic tracking, TDOA, FDOA, asynchronous localization, extended Kalman filter, edge computing, data compression, quantization.

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