Barankin bounds for position estimation using received signal strength measurements

The estimation of mobile terminal position using received signal strength measurements has been considered for cellular systems in the past. An evaluation of the potential performance of such location estimation methods is of interest. The widely used Cramer-Rao bound is not well suited for this purpose due to discontinuities or large variations in the function describing the relationship between received signal strength and the corresponding position of the mobile terminal. In this paper, the Barankin bound is used to alleviate this problem. A method for determining the lower bounds for any coverage area of interest is described. Lower bounds are presented for a candidate area based on field measurements of received signal strengths.