Experimental Evaluation of Precision of a Proximity-based Indoor Positioning System

Bluetooth Low Energy beacons are small transmitters with long battery life that are considered for providing proximity-based services. In this work we evaluate experimentally the performance of a proximity-based indoor positioning system built with off-the-shelf beacons in a realistic environment. We demonstrate that the performance of the system depends on a number of factors, such as the distance between the beacon and the mobile device, the positioning of the beacon as well as the presence and positioning of obstacles such as human bodies. We further propose an online algorithm based on moving average forecasting and evaluate the algorithm in the presence of human mobility. We conclude that algorithms for proximity-based indoor positioning must be evaluated in realistic scenarios, for instance considering people and traffic on the used radio bands. The uncertainty in positioning is high in our experiments and hence the success of commercial context-aware solutions based on BLE beacons is highly dependent on the accuracy required by each application.