scispace - formally typeset
Search or ask a question
Journal Article•DOI•

Location Fingerprinting With Bluetooth Low Energy Beacons

06 May 2015-IEEE Journal on Selected Areas in Communications (IEEE)-Vol. 33, Iss: 11, pp 2418-2428
TL;DR: This work provides a detailed study of BLE fingerprinting using 19 beacons distributed around a ~600 m2 testbed to position a consumer device, and investigates the choice of key parameters in a BLE positioning system, including beacon density, transmit power, and transmit frequency.
Abstract: The complexity of indoor radio propagation has resulted in location-awareness being derived from empirical fingerprinting techniques, where positioning is performed via a previously-constructed radio map, usually of WiFi signals. The recent introduction of the Bluetooth Low Energy (BLE) radio protocol provides new opportunities for indoor location. It supports portable battery-powered beacons that can be easily distributed at low cost, giving it distinct advantages over WiFi. However, its differing use of the radio band brings new challenges too. In this work, we provide a detailed study of BLE fingerprinting using 19 beacons distributed around a $\sim\! 600\ \mbox{m}^2$ testbed to position a consumer device. We demonstrate the high susceptibility of BLE to fast fading, show how to mitigate this, and quantify the true power cost of continuous BLE scanning. We further investigate the choice of key parameters in a BLE positioning system, including beacon density, transmit power, and transmit frequency. We also provide quantitative comparison with WiFi fingerprinting. Our results show advantages to the use of BLE beacons for positioning. For one-shot (push-to-fix) positioning we achieve $30\ \mbox{m}^2$ ), compared to $100\ \mbox{m}^2$ ) and < 8.5 m for an established WiFi network in the same area.

Content maybe subject to copyright    Report

Citations
More filters
Journal Article•DOI•
TL;DR: In this article , the authors present two techniques, including the antenna phase center offset (PCO) calibration and the multipoint time latency determination (MTLD), to reduce the impact of systematic errors on the UWB positioning accuracy.
Abstract: The ultrawideband (UWB) system generates the precise Time of Arrival (TOA) to realize precise indoor positioning for various Internet of Things (IoT) applications. However, less attention has been paid to mitigating systematic errors in the UWB positioning algorithm, which could be a significant factor that reduces the positioning accuracy. The systematic errors are introduced mainly from two aspects. First, the offsets between the antenna reference point (ARP) and the real incidence point are not carefully eliminated from the ranging observations. Second, the between-antenna time latencies used for cable-linked synchronization usually contain systematic errors at the calibration point. In this article, we present two techniques, including the antenna phase center offset (PCO) calibration and the multipoint time latency determination (MTLD), to reduce the impact of systematic errors on the UWB positioning accuracy. The experiments are carried out in an indoor parking lot. The results show that the established PCO calibration model can correct the PCO errors by 70%. The accuracy of time latency determination is improved by 10% with MTLD and further by 44% with both MTLD and PCO calibration. The static and kinematic positioning tests indicate that the horizontal accuracy is improved from 31 to 10 cm and 20 to 10 cm, respectively.

2 citations

Proceedings Article•DOI•
Yiannis Gkoufas1, Kostas Katrinis1•
01 Sep 2018
TL;DR: Copernicus is proposed, a self-learning, adaptive system that is shown to exhibit improved accuracy across different smartphone models, and leverages a minimal deployment of Bluetooth Low Energy Beacons to infer the trips of users, learn and eventually build tailored Magnetic Maps for every smartphone model for the specific indoor area.
Abstract: Indoor Positioning Systems (IPS) are gaining market momentum, mainly due to the significant reduction of sensor cost (on smartphones or standalone) and leveraging standardization of related technology. Among various alternatives for accurate and cost-effective IPS, positioning based on the Magnetic Field has proven popular, as it does not require specialized infrastructure. Related experimental results have demonstrated good positioning accuracy. However, when transitioned to production deployments, these systems exhibit serious drawbacks to make them practical: a) accuracy fluctuates significantly across smartphone models and configurations and b) costly continuous manual fingerprinting of the area is required. In this paper we propose Copernicus, a self-learning, adaptive system that is shown to exhibit improved accuracy across different smartphone models. Copernicus leverages a minimal deployment of Bluetooth Low Energy (BLE) Beacons to infer the trips of users, learn and eventually build tailored Magnetic Maps for every smartphone model for the specific indoor area. Our experimental results show the positive impact in the positioning, even in case of minimal learning.

2 citations


Additional excerpts

  • ...WiFi [1] [2] [3] [4] and BLE Beacons [5] [6] [7]....

    [...]

Proceedings Article•DOI•
01 Sep 2019
TL;DR: A novel individual positioning mechanism, called PIPing (Proxy Individual Positioning), is come up with that carries out proxy signal acquisition via IEEE 802.11 monitor mode devices and includes machine learning based signal data analytics to provide high reliable results for positioning.
Abstract: Indoor positioning of individuals is one of the most important technologies in smart home applications for user-customized support. The indoor positioning is typically fulfilled through radio signal strength indicators (RSSIs) of referred devices with specific media such as Wi-Fi access points (APs) and Wi-Fi station devices (STAs). So, the capability of typical positioning schemes is highly close to the signal acquisition environments of such media. In other words, since STAs frequently fall into a sleep mode to save the battery power and some data acquisition technologies are based on advertising intervals, the amount of RSSIs of referring devices could not be gathered enough to detect correct positions of individuals. In this paper, a novel individual positioning mechanism, called PIPing (Proxy Individual Positioning), is come up with. The PIPing mechanism carries out proxy signal acquisition via IEEE 802.11 monitor mode devices to overcome such restrictions. In addition, PIPing includes machine learning based signal data analytics to provide high reliable results for positioning. Based on the proof-of-concept prototype, PIPing can acquire much higher amount of RSSI data than existing manners, about 330% increment; the reliability of positioning for a home with seven rooms shows 96.4% via the support vector machine (SVM) and 96.5% by the multilayer perceptron (MLP) with autoencoder denoising to tune up signals.

2 citations


Cites background from "Location Fingerprinting With Blueto..."

  • ...Smart home applications mainly provide user-customized automation of home appliance or energy saving based on the presence of home members [1]- [4]....

    [...]

  • ...Because the collision and interference are occurred by the nature of the wireless medium and the scan interval of the STA is slower than the advertisement interval of the AP [4]....

    [...]

  • ...In recent years, Wi-Fi has gained tremendous popularity at residential homes and even Internet-of-Things (IoT) home appliance [4]....

    [...]

Posted Content•
Yu Wang1, Guangbing Zhou1, Chenlu Xiang1, Shunqing Zhang1, Shugong Xu1 •
TL;DR: This paper proposes a joint visual and wireless signal feature based approach for high-precision indoor localization system where WiFi signals are utilized to compute the coarse area with likelihood probability and visual images are used to fine-tune the localization result.
Abstract: The existing localization systems for indoor applications basically rely on wireless signal With the massive deployment of low-cost cameras, the visual image based localization become attractive as well However, in the existing literature, the hybrid visual and wireless approaches simply combine the above schemes in a straight forward manner, and fail to explore the interactions between them In this paper, we propose a joint visual and wireless signal feature based approach for high-precision indoor localization system In this joint scheme, WiFi signals are utilized to compute the coarse area with likelihood probability and visual images are used to fine-tune the localization result Based on the numerical results, we show that the proposed scheme can achieve 062m localization accuracy with near real-time running time

2 citations


Additional excerpts

  • ...Together with inertial navigation system (INS) [5], the GNSS based outdoor solution is able to reach meter level seamless localization accuracy, while it is still quite challenging to achieve the same level in the indoor environment using either Bluetooth low energy (BLE) [2] or widely deployed 3GPP LTE/5G and WiFi signals [3], [4]....

    [...]

References
More filters
Journal Article•DOI•
01 Nov 2007
TL;DR: Comprehensive performance comparisons including accuracy, precision, complexity, scalability, robustness, and cost are presented.
Abstract: Wireless indoor positioning systems have become very popular in recent years. These systems have been successfully used in many applications such as asset tracking and inventory management. This paper provides an overview of the existing wireless indoor positioning solutions and attempts to classify different techniques and systems. Three typical location estimation schemes of triangulation, scene analysis, and proximity are analyzed. We also discuss location fingerprinting in detail since it is used in most current system or solutions. We then examine a set of properties by which location systems are evaluated, and apply this evaluation method to survey a number of existing systems. Comprehensive performance comparisons including accuracy, precision, complexity, scalability, robustness, and cost are presented.

4,123 citations


"Location Fingerprinting With Blueto..." refers background in this paper

  • ...Indoor positioning is a mature research field, with many proposed technologies and techniques—comprehensive overviews can be found in [2], [18], [19]....

    [...]

Proceedings Article•DOI•
06 Jun 2005
TL;DR: The Horus system identifies different causes for the wireless channel variations and addresses them and uses location-clustering techniques to reduce the computational requirements of the algorithm and the lightweight Horus algorithm helps in supporting a larger number of users by running the algorithm at the clients.
Abstract: We present the design and implementation of the Horus WLAN location determination system. The design of the Horus system aims at satisfying two goals: high accuracy and low computational requirements. The Horus system identifies different causes for the wireless channel variations and addresses them to achieve its high accuracy. It uses location-clustering techniques to reduce the computational requirements of the algorithm. The lightweight Horus algorithm helps in supporting a larger number of users by running the algorithm at the clients.We discuss the different components of the Horus system and its implementation under two different operating systems and evaluate the performance of the Horus system on two testbeds. Our results show that the Horus system achieves its goal. It has an error of less than 0.6 meter on the average and its computational requirements are more than an order of magnitude better than other WLAN location determination systems. Moreover, the techniques developed in the context of the Horus system are general and can be applied to other WLAN location determination systems to enhance their accuracy. We also report lessons learned from experimenting with the Horus system and provide directions for future work.

1,631 citations


"Location Fingerprinting With Blueto..." refers background in this paper

  • ...Here the focus is on radio positioning, specifically using the empirical fingerprinting techniques [3], [15], [17], [22] that avoid the need to model the complex radio propagation environment indoors by patternmatching to a previously surveyed map of radio signal strengths....

    [...]

Journal Article•DOI•
Robert Harle1•
TL;DR: It is concluded that PDR techniques alone can offer good short- to medium- term tracking under certain circumstances, but that regular absolute position fixes from partner systems will be needed to ensure long-term operation and to cope with unexpected behaviours.
Abstract: With the continual miniaturisation of sensors and processing nodes, Pedestrian Dead Reckoning (PDR) systems are becoming feasible options for indoor tracking. These use inertial and other sensors, often combined with domain-specific knowledge about walking, to track user movements. There is currently a wealth of relevant literature spread across different research communities. In this survey, a taxonomy of modern PDRs is developed and used to contextualise the contributions from different areas. Techniques for step detection, characterisation, inertial navigation and step-and-heading-based dead-reckoning are reviewed and compared. Techniques that incorporate building maps through particle filters are analysed, along with hybrid systems that use absolute position fixes to correct dead-reckoning output. In addition, consideration is given to the possibility of using smartphones as PDR sensing devices. The survey concludes that PDR techniques alone can offer good short- to medium- term tracking under certain circumstances, but that regular absolute position fixes from partner systems will be needed to ensure long-term operation and to cope with unexpected behaviours. It concludes by identifying a detailed list of challenges for PDR researchers.

749 citations


"Location Fingerprinting With Blueto..." refers background in this paper

  • ...fingerprints with other sources to form hybrid systems, many of which are based on the idea of Simultaneous Localization and Mapping (SLAM) [10], [16] being applied to pedestrian dead reckoning [13]....

    [...]

Victor Bahl1, Venkata N. Padmanabhan1•
01 Feb 2000
TL;DR: This paper analyzes shortcomings of the basic system, develops and evaluates solutions to address these shortcomings, and describes several new enhancements, including a novel access point-based environmental profiling scheme, and a Viterbi-like algorithm for continuous user tracking and disambiguation of candidate user locations.
Abstract: We address the problem of locating users inside buildings using a radio-frequency (RF) wireless LAN. A previous paper presented the basic design and a limited evaluation of a user-location system we have developed. In this paper, we analyze shortcomings of the basic system, and develop and evaluate solutions to address these shortcomings. Additionally, we describe several new enhancements, including a novel access point-based environmental profiling scheme, and a Viterbi-like algorithm for continuous user tracking and disambiguation of candidate user locations. Using extensive data collected from our deployment, we evaluate our system’s performance over multiple wireless LAN technologies and in different buildings on our campus. We also discuss significant practical issues that arise in implementing such a system. Our techniques are implemented purely in software and are easily deployable over a standard wireless LAN.

608 citations

01 Jun 2010
TL;DR: NTP version 4 (NTPv4), which is backwards compatible with NTP version 3 (N TPv3), described in RFC 1305, as well as previous versions of the protocol, are described.
Abstract: The Network Time Protocol (NTP) is widely used to synchronize computer clocks in the Internet. This document describes NTP version 4 (NTPv4), which is backwards compatible with NTP version 3 (NTPv3), described in RFC 1305, as well as previous versions of the protocol. NTPv4 includes a modified protocol header to accommodate the Internet Protocol version 6 address family. NTPv4 includes fundamental improvements in the mitigation and discipline algorithms that extend the potential accuracy to the tens of microseconds with modern workstations and fast LANs. It includes a dynamic server discovery scheme, so that in many cases, specific server configuration is not required. It corrects certain errors in the NTPv3 design and implementation and includes an optional extension mechanism. [STANDARDS-TRACK]

605 citations


"Location Fingerprinting With Blueto..." refers methods in this paper

  • ...Before each experiment, each clock was manually synchronized using a Network Time Protocol (NTP) server [20]....

    [...]