Impact of Emitter-Sensor Geometry on Accuracy of Received Signal Strength Based Geolocation

The Cramer-Rao lower bound (CRLB) is derived for the miss distance of an emitter geolocation system using received signal strength (RSS) measurements from spatially dispersed sensors. This result can be written as the product of several factors, one of which completely characterizes the effect of the emitter-sensor geometry on geolocation accuracy. This particular factor, which depends only on the relative positions of the emitter and sensors, is referred to as the geometric dilution of precision (G) in this paper. The properties of G can be analyzed using a combination of computer simulations and statistical analysis. These results provide useful insights into the problem of optimal sensor placement with respect to the area of interest for RSS based geolocation.