Minimizing Location Uncertainty in Deployment of Access Points

In recent years, wireless sensor networks have been applied to several applications of data gathering and target localization across large geographical areas. In this paper, based on a representative sensor network system for lost hiker localization in wilderness areas, we study the problem of sensor/access-point deployment in constrained environments with the goal of minimizing localization uncertainty. We first present theoretical analysis of the problems for different problem attributes. Then we propose an efficient two-phase algorithm to find the access point placement with four different heuristics. In addition, we present experimental results to compare the performance of different heuristics and one heuristic namely divide-merge is shown to outperform all others and achieves solutions very close to the optimal