Implementation of Android Application for Indoor Positioning System with Estimote BLE Beacons

Due to recent advances in IoT (Internet of Things) related technology, demands of highly accurate indoor positioning system and services have been remarkably increased. The proposed indoor positioning system utilizes 4 Estimote BLE (Bluetooth Low Energy) beacons to measure the user position with a smartphone. Each beacon broadcasts radio signal and a smartphone can receive these signals to estimate the distance by measuring RSSI (Received Signal Strength Indicator) values. In this paper, we proposed a new estimation algorithm to robustly calculate a user’s position based on the strength of received signals. The proposed algorithm collects signals at a pre-processing stage to improve the quality of RSSI values, calculates the distance according to the signal strength from each beacon, and then estimates the user position with the triangulation of overlapped regions. The experimental result of our proposed indoor positioning system shows approximately 80% of accuracy within 2m error bound for three types of room. The proposed indoor position tracking is simple and well-suited with low-cost BLE beacons.