Optimal 3D Angle of Arrival Sensor Placement with Gaussian Priors

Sensor placement is an important factor that may significantly affect the localization performance of a sensor network. This paper investigates the sensor placement optimization problem in three-dimensional (3D) space for angle of arrival (AOA) target localization with Gaussian priors. We first show that under the A-optimality criterion, the optimization problem can be transferred to be a diagonalizing process on the AOA-based Fisher information matrix (FIM). Secondly, we prove that the FIM follows the invariance property of the 3D rotation, and the Gaussian covariance matrix of the FIM can be diagonalized via 3D rotation. Based on this finding, an optimal sensor placement method using 3D rotation was created for when prior information exists as to the target location. Finally, several simulations were carried out to demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed method. Compared with the existing methods, the mean squared error (MSE) of the maximum a posteriori (MAP) estimation using the proposed method is lower by at least 25% when the number of sensors is between 3 and 6, while the estimation bias remains very close to zero (smaller than 0.15 m).