The ability of robots to estimate their location is crucial for a wide variety of autonomous operations. In settings where GPS is unavailable, measurements of transmissions from fixed beacons provide an effective means of estimating a robot's location as it navigates. The accuracy of such a beacon-based localization system depends both on how beacons are distributed in the environment, and how the robot's location is inferred based on noisy and potentially ambiguous measurements. We propose an approach for making these design decisions automatically and without expert supervision, by explicitly searching for the placement and inference strategies that, together, are optimal for a given environment. Since this search is computationally expensive, our approach encodes beacon placement as a differential neural layer that interfaces with a neural network for inference. This formulation allows us to employ standard techniques for training neural networks to carry out the joint optimization. We evaluate this approach on a variety of environments and settings, and find that it is able to discover designs that enable high localization accuracy.
The above methods address spatial placement but not transmission channel assignments, and associated issues with interference. Automatic channel assignment methods have been considered previously, but only for optimizing communication throughput @cite_10 @cite_16 --- to minimize interference from two beacons in the same channel at any location. Note that this is a very different and simpler objective than one of enabling accurate localization, where the goal is to ensure that there is a unique mapping from every RSS signature (with or without interference) to location.
@cite_16 @cite_10
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The capacity problem in wireless mesh networks can be alleviated by equipping the mesh routers with multiple radios tuned to non-overlapping channels. However, channel assignment presents a challenge because co-located wireless networks are likely to be tuned to the same channels. The resulting increase in interference can adversely affect performance. This paper presents an interference-aware channel assignment algorithm and protocol for multi-radio wireless mesh networks that address this interference problem. The proposed solution intelligently assigns channels to radios to minimize interference within the mesh network and between the mesh network and co-located wireless networks. It utilizes a novel interference estimation technique implemented at each mesh router. An extension to the conflict graph model, the multi-radio conflict graph, is used to model the interference between the routers. We demonstrate our solutions practicality through the evaluation of a prototype implementation in a IEEE 802.11 testbed. We also report on an extensive evaluation via simulations. In a sample multi-radio scenario, our solution yields performance gains in excess of 40 compared to a static assignment of channels. Multichannel communication in a wireless mesh network with routers having multiple radio interfaces significantly enhances the network capacity. Efficient channel assignment and routing is critical for realization of optimal throughput in such networks. In this paper, we investigate the problem of finding the largest number of links that can be activated simultaneously in a wireless mesh network subject to interference, radio and connectivity constraints. Our goal is to activate all such links and we present an interference aware channel assignment algorithm that realizes this goal. We show that the Link Interference Graph created by utilizing a frequently used interference model gives rise to a special class of graphs, known as overlapping double-disk (ODD) graphs. We prove that the Maximum Independent Set computation problem is NP-complete for this special class of graphs. We provide a Polynomial Time Approximation Scheme (PTAS) for computation of the Maximum Independent Set of an ODD graph. We use this PTAS to develop a channel assignment algorithm for a multiradio multichannel Wireless Mesh Network. We evaluate the performance of our channel assignment algorithm by comparing it with the optimal solution obtained by solving an integer linear program. Experimental results demonstrate that our channel assignment algorithm produces near optimal solution in almost all instances of the problem.