Disclosed is a beacon-based positioning system. A beacon position in which a beacon is installable is defined in a target space, and a path loss model of radio frequency (RF) signals between all beacon positions and all observation positions of a scanner is determined. Among all possible installation plans for the beacon positions, an installation plan in which different beacon signals, whose RSSIs calculated using the path loss model have significant values, are received in a number greater than or equal to a minimum reference number and a total number of the beacons installed is minimum is determined as an optimal installation plan. The optimization problem of determining the optimal installation plan may be expressed by binary linear programming.