Fundamental Limits of Wideband Localization - Part I: A General Framework

The availability of positional information is of great importance in many commercial, public safety, and military applications. The coming years will see the emergence of locationaware networks with sub-meter accuracy, relying on accurate range measurements provided by wide bandwidth transmissions. In this two-part paper, we determine the fundamental limits of localization accuracy of wideband wireless networks in harsh multipath environments. We first develop a general framework to characterize the localization accuracy of a given node here and then extend our analysis to cooperative location-aware networks in Part II. In this paper, we characterize localization accuracy in terms of a performance measure called the squared position error bound (SPEB), and introduce the notion of equivalent Fisher information to derive the SPEB in a succinct expression. This methodology provides insights into the essence of the localization problem by unifying localization information from individual a...

• Type: Journal
• Year: 2010
• Where: CORR
• Authors: Yuan Shen, Moe Z. Win
• Keywords: CORR 2010, Education, Fundamental Limit, Localization Accuracy, Sub-meter Accuracy