Geometrical Optimization of A Novel Beacon Placement Strategy for 3D Indoor Localization

This paper presents a novel beacon placement strategy and its geometric evaluation for the accuracy of three dimensional (3D) indoor localization. The proposed method assumes the beacon placement domain to be a grid of candidate locations on the surface of ceilings and walls of target indoor geometry. The effect of error propagation due to the geometrical arrangement between anchor beacons and target devices is formulated as an optimization objective. A Mixed Integer Linear Programming (MILP) approach is used to minimize the required total beacon count, constrained by the resulting Geometric Dilution of Precision (GDoP) at each candidate device location. To demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed technique, the surface placement is compared against the typical linear placement of beacons which considers a planar geometry between device and beacon locations. A resulting improvement in minimum achievable GDoP while keeping the same beacon count was reported for surface over linear beacon placement.