A Primer on the Statistical Relation between Wireless Ultra-Reliability and Location Estimation

TL;DR

This paper explores the fundamental statistical relationship between location estimation uncertainty and wireless link reliability, deriving bounds and highlighting the impact of location errors on communication performance.

Contribution

It introduces a Cramér-Rao bound for localization error and analyzes how location uncertainty affects wireless link reliability and rate selection.

Findings

Reliability is highly sensitive to location errors when channel statistics depend on location.

A Cramér-Rao bound for localization error is derived.

Choosing rates that meet reliability targets is challenging under location uncertainty.

Abstract

Location information is often used as a proxy to infer the performance of a wireless communication link. Using a very simple model, this letter unveils a basic statistical relation between the location estimation uncertainty and wireless link reliability. First, a Cram\'er-Rao bound for the localization error is derived. Then, wireless link reliability is characterized by how likely the outage probability is to be above a target threshold. We show that the reliability is sensitive to location errors, especially when the channel statistics are also sensitive to the location. Finally, we highlight the difficulty of choosing a rate that meets target reliability while accounting for the location uncertainty.