Optimized indoor positioning for static mode smart devices using BLE

Abstract

Bluetooth Low Energy (BLE) technology and BLE-based devices such as iBeacons have become popular recently. In this work, an optimized indoor positioning approach using BLE for detecting a smart device's location in an indoor environment is proposed. The first stage of the proposed approach is a calibration stage for initialization. The Received Signal Strength Indicator (RSSI) is collected and pre-processed for a stable outcome, in the second stage. Then the distance is estimated by using the processed RSSI and calibrated factors in the third stage. The final stage is the position estimation using the outputs from the previous steps. The positioning technique, which is an improved Least Square estimation is evaluated against the other well-known techniques such as, Trilateration-Centroid, classic Least Square Estimation in estimating the user's location in the 2D plane. Experimental results show that our proposed approach has promising results by achieving an accuracy of positioning within 0.2 to 0.35m.