Performance Comparison of Indoor Positioning Schemes Exploiting Wi-Fi APs and BLE Beacons

Abstract

In this paper, we compare the performance of the positioning scheme exploiting between Wi-Fi and Bluetooth low-energy (BLE) beacons for indoor environments. We use the received signal strength (RSS) of the wireless device and analyze the accuracy of estimated position by using the weighted centroid localization technique. For a comparison trough experiments, we developed an Android-based smartphone application to collect both Wi-Fi and BLE RSS simultaneously at the same smart-phone. Experiments were conducted on the 6th floor of the general office building and both schemes were compared at 8 points in 16m × 7m space. According to the experimental results, it is shown that the performance between Wi-Fi and BLE can be different with respect to the density as well as the deployment of Wi-Fi APs and BLE beacons.