Spatio-temporal information coupling in cooperative network navigation

The availability of reliable positional information is a key enabler for numerous emerging location-based applications. Network navigation via joint spatial and temporal cooperation can provide mobile nodes with high-accuracy and robust positional information. Meanwhile, this joint cooperation incurs intricate information acquisition due to the correlation in inferred nodes´ position, referred to as information coupling. In this paper, we quantify the information coupling in four representative scenarios by Fisher information analysis. We show that the information obtained by each node is a sum of the contribution from its own spatio-temporal cooperation and information coupling due to the cooperation of its neighbors. Our results shed lights on the complex information acquisition in network navigation, and can serve as a design guideline for efficient network navigation algorithms.