Efficient Anchor Power Allocation for Location-Aware Networks

Many future wireless applications rely on the availability of position information for mobile wireless nodes (agents). Such information can be obtained through ranging and communication between agents and fixed infrastructure (anchors). Since the transmission power of the anchors affects network lifetime, throughput, and interference, in this paper we will investigate the problem of power allocation among anchors. We start with a formulation of minimizing the squared position error bound (SPEB), which characterizes the limits of location accuracy. However, the problem is difficult to solve due to its non-convexity. To address this issue, we leverage the insights obtained from the geometric interpretation of localization information and formulate the objective to maximum directional position error bound (DPEB). We first solve the problem for the single-agent case, and then extend the algorithm for the multiple-agent case. The simulation results show that the proposed scheme achieves close-to-optimal solution but with much lower computational complexity.