Statistical analysis of COB-based location estimation in cellular mobile radio systems

Count-of-beacon (COB) is a new fundamental radiolocation technique which is resistant to the nonexistence of line-of-sight path. However, the way that cells are populated has a direct impact on its performance. This paper studies the statistical behavior of the COB-based distance measurement error in a randomly populated cellular mobile radio system for a variety of distances. The attributes of the distribution are then characterized in view of the density of nodes and the real distance value. The closed-form expression of the Cramer-Rao lower bound for the COB technique is also obtained using the acquired statistical description of the distance error. Finally, numerical examples are presented to provide an insight into the performance of the COB technique.