Adaptive beacon placement

Abstract

Beacon placement strongly affects the quality of spatial localization, a critical service for context-aware applic a- tions in wireless sensor networks; yet this aspect of local- ization has received little attention. Fixed beacon place- ment approaches such as uniform and very dense placement are not always viable and will be inadequate in very noisy environments in which sensor networks may be expected to operate (with high terrain and propagation uncertainties) . In this paper, we motivate the need for empirically adaptive beacon placement and outline a general approach based on exploration and instrumentation of the terrain conditions by a mobile human or robot agent. We design, evaluate and analyze three novel adaptive beacon placement algorithms using this approach for localization based on RF-proximity . In our evaluation, we find that beacon density rather than noise level has a more significant impact on beacon place- ment algorithms. Our beacon placement algorithms are applicable to a low (beacon) density regime of operation. Noise makes moderate density regimes more improvable.