On the Performance Limits of Cooperative Localization in Wireless Sensor Networks with Strong Sensor Position Uncertainty

Position information is crucial for diverse applications in wireless sensor networks (WSNs). In this letter, we study performance limits of anchorless cooperative localization in WSNs with strong sensor position uncertainty. Based on an approximated Cramér-Rao bound decomposition, we are able to show that the average localization performance of a network is largely determined by the number of agents and the signal metric employed rather than the network topology. Some properties of the proposed approximation, including its behavior in extended and dense networks and the performance bound of individual agents, are further analyzed. Finally, numerical results are used to verify our analysis.