Impact of Anchor Placement and Anchor Selection on Localization Accuracy

Localization of wireless devices in wireless networks is important because the location of wireless devices is a critical input for many higher‐level networking tasks. Both the placement and the selection of anchors can affect the accuracy of location estimation significantly, and consequently impact the widespread deployment of location‐based services (LBSs). This chapter investigates the problems of anchor placement and anchor selection. It discusses how the geometric layout of the anchors affects the localization performance. Different approaches that include heuristic search methods, acute triangular‐based deployment, adaptive beacon placement, and optimal placement solutions via the maximum lambda and minimum error (maxL‐minE) algorithm are discussed. The chapter studies how smartly selected anchors can achieve comparable or better localization results as compared with using all the available anchors. A variety of effective strategies are investigated, including a joint clustering technique, entropy‐based information gain, convex hull selection, and smart selection in the presence of high density of anchors.