Abstract
BLE (Bluetooth Low Energy) beacons are widely deployed for indoor proximity detection, but accurately locating them in 3D space using commodity smartphones remains challenging. RSSI-based ranging suffers from multipath fading, and existing approaches require specialized hardware or extensive calibration.
LocBLE achieves fine-grained location of BLE beacons using only a commodity smartphone, without any infrastructure changes. By exploiting smartphone motion and multi-antenna diversity, LocBLE triangulates beacon positions with significantly higher accuracy than RSSI-only approaches. This work was a collaborative project with Hewlett Packard Labs.
Key Contributions
- Fine-grained BLE beacon localization using only commodity smartphones — no specialized hardware.
- Exploits smartphone motion to synthesize a virtual antenna array for triangulation.
- Significantly outperforms RSSI-only methods in multipath-rich indoor environments.
- Collaborative work with Hewlett Packard Labs.
BibTeX
@inproceedings{chen2017locble,
title = {Locating and Tracking BLE Beacons with Smartphones},
author = {Chen, Dongyao and Jiang, Yurong and Kim, Kyu-Han and Shin, Kang G.},
booktitle = {Proceedings of the 13th International Conference on Emerging Networking EXperiments and Technologies (CoNEXT)},
year = {2017},
publisher = {ACM}
}