Effective Sensors Deployment with Localization Accuracy Constraints

In wireless localization problems, prior to the implementation of the sensor networks, it is important and valuable to know that, given the localization accuracy constraints, i.e. To ensure the localization error lower than e m at the confidence level of 1-c, then (1) how many location-known sensors (anchors) needed at least and at most? (2) how to select out optimal locations for these anchors from the available locations in order to obtain a good trade off between cost and localization performance? These two questions are investigated in detail in this paper based on received signal strength (RSS) measurements, which help to place anchors effectively and reduce much effort in networks installation. The minimal number of anchors (anchors at least) and the sufficient number of anchors (anchors at most) are derived and validated under the assumption of uniformly and randomly distribution of anchors at first, then the optimal selection problem is formulated as a quadratic programming (QP) problem, which can be solved effectively. Numerical results demonstrated the validity of the proposed methods.