Adaptive Beacon Placement

Nirupama Bulusu, John Heidemann and Deborah Estrin
University of California, Los Angeles and USC/Information Sciences Institute

Abstract

Beacon placement strongly affects the quality of spatial localization, a critical service for context-aware applications in wireless sensor networks; yet this aspect of localization has received little attention. Fixed beacon placement 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 placement algorithms. Our beacon placement algorithms are applicable to a low (beacon) density regime of operation. Noise makes moderate density regimes more improvable.

Availability

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Reference

Bulusu01a: Nirupama Bulusu, John Heidemann and Deborah Estrin. Adaptive Beacon Placement. In Proceedings of the Twenty First International Conference onf Distributed Computing Systems (ICDCS-21), April, 2001. To appear. <http://lecs.cs.ucla.edu/~bulusu/papers/Bulusu01a.html>.

@inproceedings{Bulusu01a,
	author = "Nirupama Bulusu and John Heidemann and Deborah Estrin",
	title = "Adaptive Beacon Placement",
	booktitle = "Twenty-first International Conference on Distributed Computing Systems (ICDCS-21)",
	year = "2001",
	publisher = "IEEE Computer Society",
	month = "April",
	pages = "xxx",
	keywords = "beacon placement, location, localization,self-configuration, empirical adaptation, wireless sensor networks",
	url = "http://lecs.cs.ucla.edu/~bulusu/papers/Bulusu01a.html",
	psurl = "http://lecs.cs.ucla.edu/~bulusu/papers/Bulusu01a.ps.gz",
	pdfurl = "http://lecs.cs.ucla.edu/~bulusu/papers/Bulusu01a.pdf",
	organization = "University of California, Los Angeles",
}

Copyright

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