Information theoretic bounds on mobile source localization in a dense urban environment

The FCC E-911 Phase-2 requirements have motivated increased interest in the challenge of localizing mobile sources in a dense urban environment. E-911 Phase-2 requires wireless carriers to provide the location of a 911 caller with accuracy of 100 meters in 67% of cases and 300 meters in 95% of cases. This paper proposes information theoretic bounds on source localization performance in a dense urban environment based on the distribution of received energy as a function of time and angle of arrival from the multipath propagation. The surveillance area is discretized into a grid of partitions where the partition size can be interpreted as a source localization accuracy. The proposed lower bound provides a limit on the achievable source localization accuracy for a given SNR. The bound is evaluated for several urban propagation scenarios.