A Tractable Metric for Evaluating Base Station Geometries in Cellular Network Localization

TL;DR

This paper introduces a new, analytically tractable metric for evaluating cellular network geometries that correlates with localization accuracy and can be computed directly from network parameters.

Contribution

The paper proposes a novel metric related to GDOP that is easy to compute for PPP-modeled base station layouts and indicates the likelihood of a device being inside the BS convex hull.

Findings

The metric closely relates to GDOP and characterizes geometric conditions.

It can be computed from network parameters for PPP-based layouts.

The metric indicates the probability of a device being inside or outside the BS convex hull.

Abstract

In this letter, we present a new metric for characterizing the geometric conditions encountered in cellular positioning based on the angular spread of the base stations (BSs). The metric is shown to be closely related to the geometric-dilution-of-precision (GDOP), yet has the benefit of being characterizable in terms of the network parameters for BS layouts modeled according to a Poisson point process (PPP). As an additional benefit, the metric is shown to immediately yield a device's probability of being inside or outside the convex hull of the BSs, which localization researchers will widely-recognize as being a strong indicator of localization performance.