Smartphone-Based Indoor Positioning Using BLE iBeacon and Reliable Lightweight Fingerprint Map

The introduction of Bluetooth Low Energy (BLE) technology provides new opportunities that the Global Positioning System (GPS) could not provide for indoor localization. In this article, we propose a real-time indoor tracking and positioning system using BLE beacon and smartphone sensors. Up to now, most of the system is using Pedestrian Dead Reckoning (PDR). The initial position is considered to have a high impact on the accuracy of PDR, so, based on the analysis of received signal strength (RSS), we present a method to estimate the approximate distance, then, estimate the initial position through Trilateration technique. Next, we propose a lightweight and reliable fingerprint method. This method addresses two problems: (1) to correct errors due to the initial position error and orbital drift of PDR, (2) to reduce the amount of data, number of reference points and collecting data time. The proposed system is implemented on the smartphone as an application. To verify the accuracy of the system, we performed some experiments. The results show that the system not only achieves high accuracy but also the high performance with average complexity and low cost.