Fundamental Performance Limits of TOA-Based Cooperative Localization

Abstract

Knowledge of node locations is desired in many types of wireless sensor network (WSN) technologies. Cooperative localization has been proved to provide self-calibration in the WSN even in presence of sparse reference nodes and noisy range estimates, as it relies on redundancy exploiting all the available inter-node measurements. In this paper we consider cooperative localization based on time-of-arrival (TOA) inter-node ranging. We analyze the Cramer-Rao bound on the positioning accuracy for one/two dimensional regular network topologies. The aim is to obtain some understanding of the behavior of localization accuracy for varying system settings, as a base for future evaluations of more realistic random network deployments.