Placement of Access Points for Indoor Wireless Coverage and Fingerprint-Based Localization

In the past, indoor wireless access systems had been designed mainly from the radio coverage perspective. Recently, fingerprint-based localization has also been proposed as another popular application for such access systems. However, few has been studied in the network design for both coverage and localization at the same time. This paper proposes a novel network design for guaranteeing radio coverage and maximizing fingerprint difference. The proposed scheme consists of two stages: The first stage finds the minimum number of access points and their locations to guarantee the desired coverage ratio by using an iterative search algorithm, The second stage uses the simulated annealing to further optimize the deployment so that the fingerprint difference can be maximized without compromising the coverage requirement. Our simulation results show that the proposed scheme can guarantee coverage requirement and provide higher localization accuracy.