Novel iBeacon Placement for Indoor Positioning in IoT

Indoor positioning and location estimation inside the buildings is still challenging in the Internet of Things platform. However, the GPS signals could successfully solve the outdoor localization problem. A recently introduced RSS-based device, named iBeacon, paves the way to estimate the users location inside the buildings. Due to the complexity of indoor RF environments, the positioning accuracy is affected by the placement of the iBeacons. Inadvertently, the concept of iBeacon placement for improving the accuracy remains unattended by the current research. This paper provides a comprehensive analysis and experiments on the importance of iBeacon placement, and factors impacting the beacon signal quality. Moreover, we propose a novel beacon placement strategy, Crystal-shape iBeacon Placement. As another contribution, a customized application for android is developed which is used for recording and analyzing the iBeacon signals. Our proposed placement strategy could achieve 21.7% higher precision than the existing normal iBeacon placement.