Indoor positioning through fingerprinting technics: How many beacons should be deployed and where?

Abstract

In this paper, we try to answer two questions. First, how many beacons should be deployed, regardless of their placement, to reach a given location performance in a fingerprinting localization architecture? Second, where should the beacons be deployed to enhance location performances, yet with a reduced number of beacons? Finally, hints are given on how a given level of performance can be maintained as the number of beacons is further decreased. To answer those two questions, almost 30 433MHz/868MHZ-UHF-RFID active tags have been deployed both in a corridor and in a hall environment. An electromagnetic mapping of these two environments is recorded by a reader and a post-processing is carried out to answer these two fundamental questions that find little response in the scientific literature.