A rang-free location method based on differential evolution algorithm

Indoor location based service (LBS) is an emerging subject in the field of wireless sensor network (WSN). To solve the problem of building the fingerprinting database manually in the range-free methods, an analytical fingerprinting is proposed in this paper. It can reduce the cost and has good properties on building database automatically and increase the robustness to environment. Based on the analytical fingerprinting database, the access point (AP) selection scheme using differential evolution (DE) algorithm is applied in the off-line stage, which results in an optimal deployment of APs. The simulation results are provided and the positioning performance is verified in comparison with that of classical methods.