An Innovative Procedure to Support Sensor Positioning for Large Scale Metrology Applications

As it strongly affects localization performance, beacon positioning represents a challenging issue in Large Scale Metrology applications based on wireless sensor networks. This paper presents a software-assisted procedure for an efficient displacement of ultrasonic beacons in a wireless distributed network-based system for medium-large sized object measurements. A regular-grid based strategy and a genetic algorithms-based approach to the deployment problem are presented. The resulting network configurations are compared in terms of overall costs, sensor availability and measurement precision. The genetic algorithm demonstrates to outperform the regular deployment solution, optimizing the objective functions and providing additional capabilities to represent a realistic working environment. Novelty inheres the approach to the “pre-processing” phase of a sensor network deployment, involving working environment constraints, system functional characteristics, measurand geometry, and measurement task definition in the 3-dimensional network design.