A cost-efficiency method on beacon nodes placement for wireless localization

Beacon node placement is the prerequisite for wireless localization, and the quality of placement scheme significantly affects localization accuracy. For a localization system, sufficient coverage and optimal beacon node distribution are required to provide satisfactory localization accuracy in a target area. Since the deployment cost grows with the number of beacon nodes, it is desirable to keep the number low. In this paper, we propose a cost-effective method for beacon node placement in arbitrarily shaped areas. The proposed method can guarantee satisfactory localization accuracy with a reasonable number of beacon nodes. It has polynomial time complexity and meets the beacon node distribution requirement. We theoretically analyze the lower and upper bounds of the number of beacon nodes, and use numerical analysis to verify its efficiency. Finally, we compare our approach to the existing placement methods in different scenarios. The comparison shows that our method can use fewer beacon nodes to obtain higher localization accuracy.