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

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 Cramér-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.