Anchor Layout Optimization for Ultrasonic Indoor Positioning Using Swarm Intelligence

Indoor positioning applications are craving for ever higher precision and accuracy across the entire coverage zone. Optimal anchor placement and the deployment of multiple distributed anchor nodes could have a major impact in this regard. This paper examines the influences of these two difficult to approach hypotheses by means of a straightforward ultrasonic 3D indoor positioning system deployed in a real-life scenario via a geometric based simulation framework. To obtain an optimal anchor placement, a particle swarm optimization (PSO) algorithm is introduced and consequently performed for setups ranging from 4 to 10 anchors. In this way, besides the optimal anchor placement layout, the influence of deploying several distributed anchor nodes is investigated. In order to theoretically compare the optimization progress, a system model and Cramér-Rao lower bound (CRLB) are established and the results are quantified based on the simulation data. With limited anchors, the placement is crucial to obtain a high precision high reliability (HPHR) indoor positioning system (IPS), while the addition of anchors, to a lesser extent, gives a supplementary improvement.