An AOA Optimal Positioning Method Incorporating Station Error and Sensor Deployment

In order to improve the computational accuracy of the AOA (angle of arrival) location, an AOA location method based on CTLS (constrained total least squares) and incorporating the effect of station errors is investigated. Its approximate closed-form solution is derived by first calculating the least squares solution, then substituting the least squares solution into the approximate closed-form solution and iterating to calculate the final result. Subsequently, since the result of the Fisher information matrix is minimized when the stations are uniformly distributed, the final accuracy of the AOA target location is improved by finding the optimal relative position deployment strategy for the sensor-carrying station in 3D space, under the assumption that the sensor carriers are uniformly distributed. Simulations show that, in the presence of station errors, the accuracy of AOA location is improved by approximately 10% using this paper’s calculation method, compared to the common least squares location method. In the process of target location, the Fisher information matrix is used to calculate the lower bound of the location result for the CRLB (Cramer–Rao lower bound), which is optimal when the azimuth is uniformly distributed and all on the same horizontal plane, if its pitch angle is 35.56°.