INDOOR POSITIONING SYSTEM BASED ON BLUETOOTH BEACONS
The paper is devoted to research of possibility to use Bluetooth devices for indoors navigation. Relying on alternative measurements such as Wi-Fi network, onboard accelerometers, Bluetooth devices are vastly used to solve positioning and navigation problems when there are limitations to use global positioning satellite systems (such as GPS). Recently the indoors navigation became a stand-alone subclass of the research problems with subset of developed math models and the implementation hardware. Even though there is a lot of interest in the solution of the problem, there are still no standard approach. Due to the accuracy limitations of the broadly available mobile devices applying inertial navigation approach would dramatically reduce variety of the hardware it could be used. Relying on available Wi-Fi networks for evaluation of navigation parameters also has accuracy limitations. However, using Bluetooth signal considered as way prospective for solving navigation problems. Due to the small size, relatively low prices of Bluetooth transmitters and signal features (indoors walls and bulkheads are not transparent) it is possible to deploy special indoors infrastructure for navigation purposes. The paper concludes that nature of the measurement available for Bluetooth signals is applicable for indoors accurate enough navigation for typical distances “object-beacon” in the range not more than 5-7 meters.