A reference station placement scheme in deployment of network real-time kinematic positioning systems

Reference station placement is an important problem when deploying a network based real time kinematic system. It directly affects the cost and performance of the system. However, there is lack of a theory or tool to deal with the reference station placement issue. Given a set of potential locations where reference stations can be established and the distribution of users, the reference station placement problem is to select positions among the potential reference station locations such that the total number of reference stations required is minimal subject to the maximum distance constraint between the users to their closest reference station, which is to guarantee the precision of positioning services. This paper presents a graph-theoretic model for the reference station placement problem. Based on the graphtheoretic model, an efficient algorithm for the reference station placement problem is proposed in this paper. The proposed algorithm has been implemented in Matlab and tested by simulation. In addition, an empirical study of the impact of the maximum distance constraint on the number of reference stations is conducted and the results are presented in this paper.