The Cramer-Rao bounds of RSS location estimation for 3D wireless Sensor Networks

Location information is of paramount importance for wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs). The design of WSNs has always been focused on an specific point of networks in a two-dimensional (2D) space. Nowadays this design is not enough and the study of the three dimension is needed. In this article, we focus on 3D location accuracy in WSNs. We quantify the estimation accuracy for the RSS measurements by deriving the Cramer-Rao bound (CRB), and discuss the performance in two application scenarios, 2D WSN and 3D WSN. Matlab simulation indicates that the 3D location accuracy is superior to the 2D location accuracy for WSNs with reference devices and blindfolded devices being deployed randomly.