text: 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.
  @cite_10: The design of a large-scale wireless LAN poses a number of interesting questions. Building the Wireless Andrew network at Carnegie Mellon University has given us the opportunity to deal with these questions. This article describes the approaches we have developed for the design of similar networks. A large-scale wireless LAN must be designed so that all of the target space has radio coverage (i.e., there are no coverage gaps). It must also be designed so that its capacity is adequate to carry the expected load. These requirements generally can be met by using the proper combination of access point locations, frequency assignments, and receiver threshold settings.
summary: In many scenarios, beacon allocation includes choosing both the location and channel for each beacon. These problems are typically assumed to be decoupled---the location of each beacon is first determined and then their channels are chosen to minimize interference @cite_10 This can result in a sub-optimal allocation. An exception is , who jointly solve access point placement and channel selection using a local search approximation, however they seek to maximize communication throughput, which is a more straightforward objective than localization and does not require reasoning over inference.