Locating and Tracking BLE Beacons with Smartphones

We present a smartphone-based application, called LocBLE, for enabling users to estimate the location of nearby Bluetooth low energy (BLE) beacons. In contrast to existing BLE beacon-based proximity applications that can only show coarse-grained (immediate, near, and far) distance estimation, LocBLE's fine-grained estimation can enhance human-environment interactions. LocBLE has three salient features in estimating location from BLE beacon signals. First, it is adaptive to dynamic signal propagation environments by learning the environmental changes directly from the received signal strength (RSS). Second, it performs sensor-fusion for location estimation by utilizing motion sensor data and RSS readings from a smartphone. Finally, LocBLE improves location tracking accuracy with novel on-line calibration on a set of beacons nearby. We have built a prototype of LocBLE on smartphones and evaluated it on commodity proximity-enabled beacons. Our experimental results demonstrate that LocBLE achieves an average of 1.8m and 1.2m accuracies in locating indoor and outdoor BLE beacons, respectively.

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