Accuracy of Range-Based Cooperative Localization in Wireless Sensor Networks: A Lower Bound Analysis

Accurate location information is essential for many wireless sensor network (WSN) applications. A location-aware WSN generally includes two types of nodes: sensors whose locations to be determined and anchors whose locations are known a priori. For range-based localization, sensors’ locations are deduced from anchor-to-sensor and sensor-to-sensor range measurements. Localization accuracy depends on the network parameters such as network connectivity and size. This paper provides a generalized theory that quantitatively characterizes such relation between network parameters and localization accuracy. We use the average degree as a connectivity metric and use geometric dilution of precision (DOP), equivalent to the Cramér-Rao bound, to quantify localization accuracy. We prove a novel lower bound on expectation of average geometric DOP (LB-E-AGDOP) and derives a closed-form formula that relates LB-E-AGDOP to only three parameters: average anchor degree, average sensor degree, and number of sensor nodes. The formula shows that localization accuracy is approximately inversely proportional to the average degree, and a higher ratio of average anchor degree to average sensor degree yields better localization accuracy. Furthermore, the paper demonstrates a strong connection between LB-E-AGDOP and the best achievable accuracy. Finally, we validate the theory via numerical simulations with three different random graph models.