A lower bound on expected localization error in wireless sensor network

Localization is an important research problem in WSNs (wireless sensor networks) and many WSN localization algorithms have been proposed in the literature. For a single sensor node whose anchors' positions are known, the location estimation error lower bound can be computed by using the CRLB (Cramer-Rao Lower Bound). However, it is still unclear to the research community what the localization error lower bound is from a network point of view. In this paper, we derive a lower bound of the expected localization error for a network whose sensor nodes and anchors are randomly distributed according to a Poisson point process. We show that the lower bound of the expected localization error for a network is a function of the anchor density and the variance of anchor-to-sensor distance measurements.