Smartphone-Based Real-Time Indoor Positioning Using BLE Beacons

To deal with the degraded performance of Global Navigation Satellite Systems (GNSS) in indoor environments, Indoor Positioning Systems (IPS) have been developed. The rapid proliferation of smartphones has led to many IPSs that utilize positioning technologies that are readily available on modern smartphones; including Bluetooth Low Energy (BLE).

Using radio signals such as BLE in indoor environments comes with a number of challenges that can limit the reliability of the signal. In dealing with these challenges, most existing BLE-based IPSs introduce undesired drawbacks such as an extensive and fragile calibration phase, strict hardware requirements, and increases in the system's complexity. In this paper, an IPS is developed and evaluated that requires minimal setup for indoor environments and has a sufficiently low complexity to be run locally on a modern smartphone. An extensive exploration of the IPS' parameters was performed. The best performing parameter combinations resulted in a median positioning error of 1.48 ± 0.283 meters, while using the log-distance path loss model for distance estimation and Weighted Centroid Localization with a weight exponent be-tween 2.0 and 3.5 for position estimation.