Two Practical Considerations of Beacon Deployment for Ultrasound-Based Indoor Localization Systems

In this paper, two practical considerations of beacon deployment for ultrasound-based indoor localization systems are presented. In an indoor environment, beacons are deployed incrementally on the ceiling in order to localize the listeners in between the ceiling and the floor. We first propose a water-drop shaped radio model for the beacon to replace commonly assumed spherical radio model in order to provide true coverage of the listeners. Obstacles in the indoor environment are then considered to take into account the line-of sight restrictions and thus to enable practical beacon deployment. Although when taking into these two considerations, the number of deployed beacons required tends to be high, it would otherwise be impossible to provide true coverage of the listeners in the indoor environment utilizing ultrasound-based localization.