Indoor Positioning inside an Office Building Using BLE

This paper describes current approaches regarding indoor positioning systems and their applicability in the detection of a device's indoor location using beacons that implement the Bluetooth Low Energy standard. We analyze two positioning techniques, fingerprinting and particle filtering, for two usage scenarios. The first scenario refers to a corridor with beacons placed along a straight line at equal distances one from another. The second scenario refers to a generic room divided in imaginary cells with beacons placed in the corners and the center of the room. For the first scenario, the best results were obtained using particle filtering which provided an accuracy of less than 2 meters. For the second scenario, fingerprinting provided the best accuracy with an error of about 2 meters. The results suggest that the particularities of a room may provide different outcomes, thus the characteristics of the room should be clearly defined.