Patent ID: 8712421

Claim:
A method for adding, by a computing device, one or more beacon nodes to a wireless network with a plurality of communication nodes, comprising: first selecting a grid location of a plurality of grid locations in the wireless network; determining an expected improvement to a location discovery error of a plurality of communication nodes in the wireless network in response to a beacon node being added to the grid location, wherein the determining comprises: calculating, from a location discovery error model: a first expected error in location discovery of a communication node without the beacon node being added to the grid location, and a second expected error in location discovery of the communication node with the beacon node being added to the grid location, comparing the first expected error and the second expected error to determine an expected improvement to the location discovery for the communication node in response to the beacon node being added to the grid location, repeating the calculating and the comparing to determine expected improvements to he location discovery for one or more of the plurality of communication nodes, and summing the expected improvements to determine the expected improvement of the plurality of communication nodes for the grid location; repeating the first selecting and the determining for individual grid locations of at least a portion of the plurality of grid locations to determine expected improvement to location discovery errors corresponding to the individual grid locations of at least the portion of the plurality of grid locations; and second selecting one of the plurality of grid locations to add a new beacon node, based at least in part on the determined expected improvement to location discovery errors corresponding to the individual grid locations of at least the portion of the plurality of grid locations.