A BLE RANKING BASED INDOOR POSITIONING

SYSTEM FOR GENERIC SMARTPHONES

ABSTRACT
Indoor navigation in physical retail type spaces aids the navigation of users to find
physical items at known destinations. WiFi Fingerprinting using a mobile phone is
perhaps the most widely used method. However, this is power hungry, and its
typical positioning accuracy (2.0 to 3.0 meters) is not enough to differentiate
between adjacent narrow aisles to locate items. In this paper, we present a novel
(Bluetooth Low Energy) BLE ranking based fingerprinting to correlate a new
signal position with the signal strength ranking of multiple low-power beacon
devices situated in a retail space. This offers a higher positioning accuracy and is
supported in recent smart phones. An important source of error is the RSSI, which
varies depending on the model and orientation of the phone. We present a novel
way to mitigate this. We validated our method in a retail-like indoor space of
Queen Mary Library. We achieved an average positioning error of 0.87 meters
which was sufficient to differentiate between physical space aisles.
BLOCK DIAGRAM

LCD

FINGER PIC 16F877A IBEACON

PRINT

POWER
SUPPLY
SERVER SYSTEM

Data Base and

Analysis
System

EXISTING SYSTEM

 Indoor location determination faces differing technical challenges in contrast

to that of outdoor location.
 Greater location accuracy is needed as physical assets tend to be packed
closer together than outdoors physical assets; people move, and this
increases the location determination error.
 No accurate, standard global positional system exists for indoor use. There is
no standard global spatial view, map, plan that is accessible in a standard
way. Also, the main techniques that rely on processing.
 Radio Frequency (RF) signal strength to indicate location is susceptible to
errors due to attenuation from physical objects in the transmitter-receiver
path.
PROPOSED SYSTEM
 The RSSI signal may be attenuated through the human body of the human
 Mobile phone carrier.
 It was proposed to also sense the phone orientation during the radio map or
fingerprints map collection to reduce this error.
 The methods do not explicitly mention doing this so inherently have a higher
error.

HARDWARE REQUIREMENT

 PIC MICROCONTORLLER
 IBEACON
 BLUETOOTH

SOFTWARE REQUIREMENT

 EMBEDDED C
 MPLAB IDE