BLE Location-based Services via WiFi

The large-scale Bluetooth low energy (BLE) location-based services (LBS) are challenging due to the requirement of additional Bluetooth beacons, which inevitably incur tremendous hardware and maintenance cost. To alleviate this issue, this work presents WiBeacon which repurposes ubiquitously deployed WiFi access points into virtual beacons via cross-technology communication (CTC). WiBeacon only requires moderate software updates in APs, thus enabling fast deployment with zero additional hardware and also low maintenance cost via the remote Internet access. We implement it on COTS WiFi APs and evaluate it in various scenarios including a real-world commercial BLE LBS application as the pilot study. During this two-week pilot study, our WiBeacon provides reliable LBS, e.g., as robust as conventional BLE beacons, for 512 users with 150 types of smartphones. The full paper of this work [2] was published in MobiCom 2021.