Wi-Five: Optimal Placement of Wi-Fi Routers in 5G Networks for Indoor Drone Navigation.

In the near future, unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) will be used to automate the logistics between organizations and their customers by relying on high accuracy localization. In this paper, we propose a framework that leverages the multi radio access technology (RAT) 5G network to solve the cellular positioning problem for such high mobility targets. For indoors, we utilize wireless fidelity (Wi-Fi) routers, denoted as Wi-Five dots, to improve positioning accuracy where the 5G signal is weaker compared with outdoor environments. These anchor points will use the 5G backhaul to report to the same location management function (LMF) as the cellular 5G access network. The primary contribution of this work is showing how the geometry of these indoor Wi-Five dots significantly affects positioning accuracy. Through a novel optimization algorithm based on the Evolutionary Algorithm (EA) class, we solve the NP-Hard problem of finding the optimal placement of Wi-Five dots for three-dimensional high-accuracy positioning of a mobile target. Our results show that the final positioning accuracy is the product of both the ranging errors and the geometric dilution of precision (GDOP). We experimentally verify that for the latter, the error stems primarily from the Z-axis estimations rather than the errors in the X − Y plane. Finally, we evaluate the results of our optimal placement to show it drastically improves positioning estimations in a three-dimensional space compared with arbitrary beacon placement.