Automatic position determination of fixed infrastructure sensor network nodes based on topology sensing and maps

The tracking of objects and humans has recently received a lot of attention as a tool to improve business processes, occupational and public safety. In industrial environments wireless sensor networks can facilitate deployment of tracking applications as they can establish a standalone communication infrastructure (a so called mesh network). Many such positioning and location tracking systems deploy a fixed infrastructure (so-called beacons) with known positions to determine the position of mobile nodes in the network. For large-scale deployments the installation effort of such systems may be a major cost-factor, as the exact position of each beacon needs to be manually determined and associated with map material. We therefore propose a position determination tool that automatically finds the positions of beacons based on the sensor network's topology, digital map material of the environment, and a small set of anchor nodes.