Wireless Access Point Deployment for Both Coverage and Localization

Wireless access points (APs) divide a plane into small areas where their coverage ranges overlap. A mobile device can be located within a particular small overlapped area based on the unique set of APs covering the device. We formally define an optimal AP deployment problem for both coverage and area localization. Our objective is to deploy a minimum number of APs that provide full communication coverage while achieving the ability to locate a mobile device within a certain area no larger than a given accuracy parameter. We propose a set of optimal solutions and approximations to this problem under the diamond pattern, a deployment pattern that has been shown to achieve optimal coverage in most cases. We conduct extensive numerical evaluation as well as real experiments to validate our proposed solutions.