Energy Consumption and Proximity Accuracy of BLE Beacons for Internet of Things Applications

Abstract

In the Internet of Things (IoT) era, with millions of connected devices to the internet, indoor location services regarding room discovery and resource identification/tracking are among the most popular applications for smart homes and smart buildings. Bluetooth Low Energy (BLE) beacons are a promising solution to improve the scalability and accuracy of indoor localization applications. They are low cost, configurable, small transmitters designed to attract attention to a specific location. In this paper, we investigate three popular BLE beacon devices available on the market and compare them in terms of energy consumption and proximity accuracy for indoor localization services. In addition, two state-estimation filters are developed for the Android mobile platform in order to improve the proximity accuracy when using smartphone devices. Specifically, a static Kalman filter and Gaussian filter are implemented.