  Propagation delays are intensively used for Structural Health Monitoring or
Sensor Network Localization. In this paper, we study the performances of
acoustic propagation delay estimation between two sensors, using sources of
opportunity only. Such sources are defined as being uncontrolled by the user
(activation time, location, spectral content in time and space), thus
preventing the direct estimation with classical active approaches, such as
TDOA, RSSI and AOA. Observation models are extended from the literature to
account for the spectral characteristics of the sources in this passive context
and we show how time-filtered sources of opportunity impact the retrieval of
the propagation delay between two sensors. A geometrical analogy is then
proposed that leads to a lower bound on the variance of the propagation delay
estimation that accounts for both the temporal and the spatial properties of
the sources field.
