Using Bluetooth Low Energy Beacons for Indoor Localization

Abstract

Bluetooth Low Energy (BLE) Beacons gain high popularity due to their low consumption of energy and, thereby, long lifetime. Using the BLE protocol, these devices emit advertisement packets at fixed intervals for a short duration. Indoor localization solutions aim to provide an accurate, low cost estimate of sub-room indoor positioning. There are various techniques proposed for this purpose. BLE Beacons are good hardware candidates to assist the creation of such indoor localization solutions. Given the exact position of BLE Beacons, one can attempt to estimate a receiver position according to the received signal power. In this work, we investigated the success of such an indoor localization approach employing multiple BLE Beacons and two different estimation techniques. The results of the experiments indicate that employing multiple BLE Beacons increases the success of prediction techniques considerably.