Toward Practical Access Point Deployment for Angle-of-Arrival Based Localization

The access point (AP) deployment is a fundamental task for constructing an accurate localization system. Existing literature mainly deals with the AP placement problem using optimal geometry analysis since the target-AP geometry will affect the localization performance. However, some non-ideal phenomena in practical scenario, e.g., the existence of obstacles, array orientation and path loss, will degrade the accuracy of angle-of-arrival (AoA) estimation as well as the localization accuracy. In this article, we reformulate the AP planning incorporating these factors. We decompose the problem into two subproblems, namely AP selection problem and error minimization problem. The AP selection problem selects the minimum number of APs to satisfy a desired localization accuracy, aided by a refined orientation updating procedure. We design a centralized and a distributed error minimization algorithm to further decrease the localization error. The centralized algorithm shows superiority in time efficiency. Nevertheless, the case with large number of APs may lead to excessive computational cost. Accordingly, we further devise the distributed algorithm which is adaptive to large-scale deployment. Numerical studies in indoor environments with barriers are conducted to verify our proposed approach.