Spatiotemporal Information Coupling in Network Navigation

Network navigation, encompassing both spatial and temporal cooperation to locate mobile agents, is a key enabler for numerous emerging location-based applications. In such cooperative networks, the positional information obtained by each agent is a complex compound due to the interaction among its neighbors. This information coupling may result in poor performance: algorithms that discard information coupling are often inaccurate, and algorithms that keep track of all the neighbors’ interactions are often inefficient. In this paper, we develop a principled framework to characterize the information coupling present in network navigation. Specifically, we derive the equivalent Fisher information matrix for individual agents as the sum of effective information from each neighbor and the coupled information induced by the neighbors’ interaction. We further characterize how coupled information decays with the network distance in representative case studies. The results of this paper can offer guidelines for the development of distributed techniques that adequately account for information coupling, and hence enable accurate and efficient network navigation.