Abstract: In recent years, MUSIC algorithm is frequently adopted in the estimation of time delay.It obtains and uses a set of vectors orthognal to signal time delay vectors by performing an eigendecomposition of covarince matrix of veceiving signal. Eigendecom position, however, requires a considerable amount of computations. Based on a permuted matrix rank revealing QR facterization,a new method is presented in this paper for the estimation of time delay. Computer simulation shows that the proposed method can perform almost as well as MUSIC algorithm in terms of signal resolition,and the cost of this method is much lower than eigende-composition.

Key words: covarince matris, signal time delay vector, noise subspace, QR factorization