Sub-optimal Step-by-Step Node Deployment Algorithm for User Localization in Wireless Sensor Networks

User/object localization is one of the promising applications for WSNs. So far, there is no flexible node deployment algorithm targeting on optimizing the localization performance. To facilitate node deployment for localization applications in WSNs, we propose, based on a universal performance evaluation metric, a low-complexity, step-by-step node deployment algorithm which provides sub-optimal solutions feasible for large-scale WSNs. This proposed node deployment algorithm has the computational complexity linearly proportional to the number of available nodes, and is flexible for different system scenarios, including the cases with a non-homogeneous user distribution and with an irregular sensing area. The performance of our proposed algorithm is compared with some other available benchmarks. It is found that the proposed deployment algorithm can provide flexible network topologies with very good location estimation performance.