Proposing an Extended iBeacon System for Indoor Route Guidance

This paper presents a concept of an extended iBeacon system for indoor navigation and guidance. iBeacon is a proximal wireless notification service proposed by Apple, Inc. This service uses beacon modules emitting radio waves based on Bluetooth Low Energy technology and provides automatic triggering of a single notification from a beacon module to multiple smartphones at proximity. In usual iBeacon systems, there is one-to-one correspondence between notification and beacon module. However, if we introduce a memory to remember the history of iBeacon detection, iBeacon systems can be extended to handle multiple notifications by multiple beacon modules with awareness of some contexts of pedestrians' moving directions, which enables a guide, for example, to the exit of buildings. We explain this idea for indoor route guidance using iBeacon and discuss its implementation with our simple experiment and performance evaluation.