Indoor positioning through fingerprinting technics: How many beacons should be deployed and where?

In this paper, we try to answer two questions. First, how many beacons should be deployed, regardless of their placement, to reach a given location performance in a fingerprinting localization architecture? Second, where should the beacons be deployed to enhance location performances, yet with a reduced number of beacons? Finally, hints are given on how a given level of performance can be maintained as the number of beacons is further decreased. To answer those two questions, almost 30 433MHz/868MHZ-UHF-RFID active tags have been deployed both in a corridor and in a hall environment. An electromagnetic mapping of these two environments is recorded by a reader and a post-processing is carried out to answer these two fundamental questions that find little response in the scientific literature.