Energy-Efficient Indoor Localization of Smart Hand-Held Devices Using Bluetooth

Abstract

Indoor localization of smart hand-held devices is essential for location-based services of pervasive applications. The previous research mainly focuses on exploring wireless signal fingerprints for this purpose, and several shortcomings need to be addressed first before real-world usage, e.g., demanding a large number of access points or labor-intensive site survey. In this paper, through a systematic empirical study, we first gain in-depth understandings of Bluetooth characteristics, i.e., the impact of various factors, such as distance, orientation, and obstacles on the Bluetooth received signal strength indicator (RSSI). Then, by mining from historical data, a novel localization model is built to describe the relationship between the RSSI and the device location. On this basis, we present an energy-efficient indoor localization scheme that leverages user motions to iteratively shrink the search space to locate the target device. An Motion-assisted Device Tracking Algorithm has been prototyped and evaluated in several real-world scenarios. Extensive experiments show that our algorithm is efficient in terms of localization accuracy, searching time and energy consumption.