Source ranging with an underwater geographic point in non-cooperative bistatic sonar

Abstract

Active sonar is divided into monostatic and bistatic sonar according to the relative positions of the source and the receiver. Bistatic sonar on modern submarines is classified into cooperative and non-cooperative operations. Cooperative operation uses an active signal of a friendly ship; therefore, source information is known a priori, whereas non-cooperative operation utilizes an active signal of the enemy, and hence, it is difficult to acquire source information, such as a source range, which is important for bistatic sonar operation. In order to overcome this difficulty, this paper proposes an estimation method for the source range that employs geographic information, and the utility of the source range estimation is evaluated. For the evaluation, we consider three error components. Then, the validity of the scheme is confirmed through theoretical error analysis and simulation study. The results show that geographic points that satisfy certain specific conditions can be used to estimate the source range within a range of tens of km in the simulation. Finally, we confirm that the receiver could estimate the source range from far away using non-cooperative bistatic sonar.