RF Technologies for Indoor Localization and Positioning

Abstract

Location-based services have become an important market. At their core, location-based services generally rely on identifying the location of individuals or objects. In outdoor environments, determining the location is typically accomplished by means of GPS. In indoor environments, Bluetooth Low Energy (BLE) based localization has received a lot of attention. Most recently, an increasing number of mobile devices are capable of supporting ANT as an alternative low-power communication protocol. Unlike BLE, however, the suitability of ANT for localization has not been analyzed extensively. We report the initial results of an experimental study to compare ANT and BLE when used for localization. The results suggest that ANT-based localization can clearly outperform BLE, when using fingerprinting as the underlying localization principle.