Practical limits in RSS-based positioning

Received signal strength (RSS) based source localization papers often ignore the practical effects of range limits in the measurements. In many devices, this results in some sensors not reporting beyond some maximum range; and in others, the RSS is still observed but may exhibit a noise floor at large ranges. This paper models these situations and demonstrates their effect on positioning algorithms. Measured data is used to validate the cooperative and non-cooperative RSS limits. The Fisher information, Cramer-Rao lower bound, and maximum likelihood estimation error are used to quantify effects on positioning.