Delay-Accuracy Tradeoff in Opportunistic Time-of-Arrival Localization

Journal article, 2018

While designing a positioning network, the localization performance is traditionally the main concern. However, collection of measurements together with channel access methods require a nonzero time, causing a delay experienced by network nodes. This fact is usually neglected in the positioning-related literature. In terms of the delay-accuracy tradeoff, broadcast schemes have an advantage over unicast, provided nodes can be properly synchronized. In this letter, we analyze the delay-accuracy tradeoff for localization schemes in which the position estimates are obtained based on broadcasted ranging signals. We find that for dense networks, the tradeoff is the same for cooperative and noncooperative networks, and cannot exceed a certain threshold value.