Beacon Placement and Signal Strength Estimation to Improve Localization Coverage and Accuracy

Estimating the location of a mobile device using Bluetooth signal strength observations is an active research area due to its promising application in location-based services. Field deployment of localization systems is facing many challenges. This includes optimal placement of sensors to improve the localization coverage and modeling the uncertainty in wireless signals given the complexity of signal propagation in the presence of heterogeneous factors like operating environment and obstacles. In this paper, we first present a heuristics-based technique for the placement of beacons assuming map data is available. Our beacon placement algorithm results in a significant improvement in configuration time and coverage while using a smaller number of beacons. Further, we propose a Gaussian-process-based novel hybrid kernel function to generate a robust likelihood model for signal strength estimation. Our experiments over 83 randomly sampled data points demonstrate a superior ranging and localization performance of our approach.