Resource optimization for asynchronous cooperative location-aware networks

Wireless localization systems are of great importance for a variety of modern applications. Recently, cooperation among agents (nodes with unknown positions) becomes attractive in localization networks, especially in the infrastructure-limited scenario. In many cases, synchronization of the agents' clocks to the anchors (nodes with known positions) has to be performed together with the localization. In this paper, we first show the fundamental limits of localization and synchronization in asynchronous cooperative localization networks, in terms of equivalent Fisher information matrix (EFIM). It shows that the synchronization of agents can be treated equivalently as position estimation. We then perform power and bandwidth allocation among anchors and agents, to achieve the optimal results for joint position and clock offset estimation. Numeric results confirm the performance advantages of the presented strategies. Meaningful performance benchmarks and intuitive remarks are thus provided.