skip to main content
10.1145/3143361.3143385acmconferencesArticle/Chapter ViewAbstractPublication PagesconextConference Proceedingsconference-collections
research-article

Locating and Tracking BLE Beacons with Smartphones

Published: 28 November 2017 Publication History

Abstract

We present a smartphone-based application, called LocBLE, for enabling users to estimate the location of nearby Bluetooth low energy (BLE) beacons. In contrast to existing BLE beacon-based proximity applications that can only show coarse-grained (immediate, near, and far) distance estimation, LocBLE's fine-grained estimation can enhance human-environment interactions.
LocBLE has three salient features in estimating location from BLE beacon signals. First, it is adaptive to dynamic signal propagation environments by learning the environmental changes directly from the received signal strength (RSS). Second, it performs sensor-fusion for location estimation by utilizing motion sensor data and RSS readings from a smartphone. Finally, LocBLE improves location tracking accuracy with novel on-line calibration on a set of beacons nearby. We have built a prototype of LocBLE on smartphones and evaluated it on commodity proximity-enabled beacons. Our experimental results demonstrate that LocBLE achieves an average of 1.8m and 1.2m accuracies in locating indoor and outdoor BLE beacons, respectively.

References

[1]
How beacons will influence billions in us retail sales. http://www.businessinsider.com/beacons-impact-billions-in-reail-sales-2015-2.
[2]
Health media network announces partnership with gimbal, inc. https://www.gimbal.com/press-releases/health-media-network-announces-partnership-with-gimbal-inc-creating-the-first-and-largest-healfhcare-proximity-beacon-network-in-the-u-s/.
[3]
Waze launches bluetooth beacons to avoid tunnel blackouts. https://techcrunch.com/2016/09/21/waze-launches-bluetoofh-beacons-to-avoid-tunnel-blackouts/.
[4]
How beacons can reshape retail marketing. https://www.thinkwithgoogle.com/articles/retail-marketing-beacon-technology.html.
[5]
Souvik Sen, Jeongkeun Lee, Kyu-Han Kim, and Paul Congdon. Avoiding Multipath to Revive Inbuilding WiFi Localization. In ACM MobiSys, 2013.
[6]
Ramsey Faragher and Robert Harle. An analysis of the accuracy of bluetooth low energy for indoor positioning applications. In Proceedings of the 27th International Technical Meeting of The Satellite Division of the Institute of Navigation (ION GNSS+ 2014), Tampa, FL, USA, volume 812, page 2, 2014.
[7]
W. W. L. Li, R. A. litis, and M. Z. Win. A smartphone localization algorithm using rssi and inertial sensor measurement fusion. In IEEE Global Communications Conference (GLOBECOM), pages 3335--3340, Dec 2013.
[8]
Gaddi Blumrosen, Bracha Hod, Tal Anker, Danny Dolev, and Boris Rubinsky. Enhanced calibration technique for rssi-based ranging in body area networks. Ad Hoc Netw., 11(1):555--569, January 2013.
[9]
David Tse and Pramod Viswanath. Fundamentals of Wireless Communication. Cambridge university press, 2005.
[10]
Guoqiang Mao, Brian D.O. Anderson, and BarÄśÅ§ Fidan. Path loss exponent estimation for wireless sensor network localization. Computer Networks, 51(10):2467--2483, 2007.
[11]
J. Koo and H. Cha. Localizing wifi access points using signal strength. IEEE Communications Letters, 15(2):187--189, February 2011.
[12]
Jue Wang and Dina Katabi. Dude, where's my card?: Rfid positioning that works with multipath and non-line of sight. In ACM SIGCOMM, 2013.
[13]
Longfei Shangguan, Zheng Yang, Alex X. Liu, Zimu Zhou, and Yunhao Liu. Relative localization of rfid tags using spatial-temporal phase profiling. In USENIX NSDI, 2015.
[14]
NFC White Paper. https://www.ecma-international.org/activities/Communications/tc32-tgl9-2005-012.pdf.
[15]
Title 47 cfr part 15. http://www.ecfr.gov/cgi-bin/47cfrvl_02.tpl.
[16]
Bluetooth 5.0 core specification, transmitter characteristics, page 2536. https://www.bluetooth.com/specifications/adopted-specifications.
[17]
BLE Specification. https://www.bluetooth.com/specifications.
[18]
Bluetooth low energy beacons. http://www.ti.com/lit/an/swra475a/swra475a.pdf.
[19]
Bcm4339 datasheet. http://www.cypress.com/file/298016/.
[20]
SVM in sklearn module. http://scikit-learn.org/stable/modules/svm.html.
[21]
Anonymity. Locating and Tracking BLE Beacons with Smartphones. Technical report, Please refer to PC Chair for a Technical Report copy.
[22]
Dongyao Chen, Kyong-Tak Cho, Sihui Han, Zhizhuo Jin, and Kang G. Shin. Invisible sensing of vehicle steering with smartphones. In ACM MobiSys, 2015.
[23]
Alex T. Mariakakis, Souvik Sen, Jeongkeun Lee, and Kyu-Han Kim. Sail: Single access point-based indoor localization. In ACM MobiSys, 2014.
[24]
Nirupam Roy, He Wang, and Romit Roy Choudhury. I am a smartphone and i can tell my user's walking direction. In ACM MobiSys, 2014.
[25]
Yuanchao Shu, Kang G Shin, Tian He, and Jiming Chen. Last-mile navigation using smartphones. In ACM MobiCom, 2015.
[26]
Fan Li, Chunshui Zhao, Guanzhong Ding, Jian Gong, Chenxing Liu, and Feng Zhao. A reliable and accurate indoor localization method using phone inertial sensors. In ACM UbiComp, 2012.
[27]
Donald J. Bemdt and James Clifford. Using dynamic time warping to find patterns in time series, 1994.
[28]
Chotirat Ann Ratanamahatana and Eamonn Keogh. Everything you know about dynamic time warping is wrong. In Third Workshop on Mining Temporal and Sequential Data, 2004.
[29]
swix. http://stsievert.com/swix/.
[30]
Mohamed Boucadair, Reinaldo Penno, and Dan Wing. Universal plug and play (upnp) internet gateway device-port control protocol interworking function (igd-pcp iwf). 2013.
[31]
Azkario Rizky Pratama, Risanuri Hidayat, et al. Smartphone-based pedestrian dead reckoning as an indoor positioning system. In System Engineering and Technology (ICSET), 2012 International Conference on, pages 1--6. IEEE, 2012.
[32]
Estimote Beacons. http://estimote.com/.
[33]
Radbeacon usb dongle. http://www.radiusnetworks.com/.
[34]
LocBLE Demo. https://goo.gl/6MJOeX.
[35]
Dartle iBeacon Locator. https://cloud.dartle.io/.
[36]
XCode IDE for iOS development. https://developer.apple.com/xcode/ide/.
[37]
Apple iBeacon. https://developer.apple.com/ibeacon/, 2013.
[38]
Eddystone Beacon. https://developers.google.com/beacons/.
[39]
Altbeacon. http://altbeacon.org/, 2015.
[40]
Jie Xiong and Kyle Jamieson. ArrayTrack: A Fine-grained Indoor Location System. In USENIX NSDI, 2013.
[41]
Swarun Kumar, Ezzeldin Hamed, Dina Katabi, and Li Erran Li. LTE Radio Analytics Made Easy and Accessible. In ACM SIGCOMM, 2014.
[42]
Manikanta Kotaru, Kiran Joshi, Dinesh Bharadia, and Sachin Katti. SpotFi: Decimeter Level Localization Using WiFi. In ACM SIGCOMM, 2015.
[43]
P. Bahl and V. N. Padmanabhan. Radar: an in-building rf-based user location and tracking system. In IEEE INFOCOM, 2000.
[44]
Moustafa Youssef and Ashok Agrawala. The horus wlan location determination system. In ACM MobiSys, 2005.
[45]
Zengbin Zhang, Xia Zhou, Weile Zhang, Yuanyang Zhang, Gang Wang, Ben Y. Zhao, and Haitao Zheng. I am the antenna: Accurate outdoor ap location using smartphones. In ACM MobiCom, 2011.
[46]
Hyojeong Shin, Yohan Chon, Kwanghyo Park, and Hojung Cha. Findingmimo: Tracing a missing mobile phone using daily observations. In ACM MobiSys, 2011.
[47]
E. Au. The latest progress on ieee 802.11mc and ieee 802.11ai {standards}. IEEE Vehicular Technology Magazine, 11(3):19--21, Sept 2016.
[48]
Bluetooth 5.0 standard. https://www.bluetooth.com/specifications/adopted-specifications.

Cited By

View all
  • (2025)On the accuracy of BLE indoor localization systemsComputers and Electrical Engineering10.1016/j.compeleceng.2024.109455118:PBOnline publication date: 7-Jan-2025
  • (2024)Passengers' safety mattersProceedings of the 21st USENIX Symposium on Networked Systems Design and Implementation10.5555/3691825.3691928(1883-1900)Online publication date: 16-Apr-2024
  • (2024)MagDesk: Interactive Tabletop Workspace Based on Passive Magnetic TrackingProceedings of the ACM on Interactive, Mobile, Wearable and Ubiquitous Technologies10.1145/36997568:4(1-31)Online publication date: 21-Nov-2024
  • Show More Cited By

Index Terms

  1. Locating and Tracking BLE Beacons with Smartphones

    Recommendations

    Comments

    Information & Contributors

    Information

    Published In

    cover image ACM Conferences
    CoNEXT '17: Proceedings of the 13th International Conference on emerging Networking EXperiments and Technologies
    November 2017
    492 pages
    ISBN:9781450354226
    DOI:10.1145/3143361
    Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than ACM must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected]

    Sponsors

    Publisher

    Association for Computing Machinery

    New York, NY, United States

    Publication History

    Published: 28 November 2017

    Permissions

    Request permissions for this article.

    Check for updates

    Author Tags

    1. Bluetooth low energy
    2. Internet of Things (IoT)

    Qualifiers

    • Research-article
    • Research
    • Refereed limited

    Conference

    CoNEXT '17
    Sponsor:

    Acceptance Rates

    Overall Acceptance Rate 198 of 789 submissions, 25%

    Contributors

    Other Metrics

    Bibliometrics & Citations

    Bibliometrics

    Article Metrics

    • Downloads (Last 12 months)57
    • Downloads (Last 6 weeks)10
    Reflects downloads up to 03 Mar 2025

    Other Metrics

    Citations

    Cited By

    View all
    • (2025)On the accuracy of BLE indoor localization systemsComputers and Electrical Engineering10.1016/j.compeleceng.2024.109455118:PBOnline publication date: 7-Jan-2025
    • (2024)Passengers' safety mattersProceedings of the 21st USENIX Symposium on Networked Systems Design and Implementation10.5555/3691825.3691928(1883-1900)Online publication date: 16-Apr-2024
    • (2024)MagDesk: Interactive Tabletop Workspace Based on Passive Magnetic TrackingProceedings of the ACM on Interactive, Mobile, Wearable and Ubiquitous Technologies10.1145/36997568:4(1-31)Online publication date: 21-Nov-2024
    • (2024)Indoor Localization With Multi-Beam of 5G New Radio SignalsIEEE Transactions on Wireless Communications10.1109/TWC.2024.338073723:9(11260-11275)Online publication date: Sep-2024
    • (2024)Centimeter-Level Indoor Visible Light PositioningIEEE Communications Magazine10.1109/MCOM.002.230029662:3(48-53)Online publication date: Mar-2024
    • (2024)BLE Location Tracking Attacks by Exploiting Frequency Synthesizer ImperfectionIEEE INFOCOM 2024 - IEEE Conference on Computer Communications10.1109/INFOCOM52122.2024.10621247(1860-1869)Online publication date: 20-May-2024
    • (2024)A Survey of Bluetooth Indoor Localization2024 IEEE 10th Conference on Big Data Security on Cloud (BigDataSecurity)10.1109/BigDataSecurity62737.2024.00020(71-77)Online publication date: 10-May-2024
    • (2023)Analysis and Evaluation of Tracker Tag EfficiencyWireless Communications & Mobile Computing10.1155/2023/28802292023Online publication date: 1-Jan-2023
    • (2023)Single Packet, Single Channel, Switched Antenna Array for RF LocalizationProceedings of the ACM on Interactive, Mobile, Wearable and Ubiquitous Technologies10.1145/35962637:2(1-25)Online publication date: 12-Jun-2023
    • (2023)Synthetic Smartwatch IMU Data Generation from In-the-wild ASL VideosProceedings of the ACM on Interactive, Mobile, Wearable and Ubiquitous Technologies10.1145/35962617:2(1-34)Online publication date: 12-Jun-2023
    • Show More Cited By

    View Options

    Login options

    View options

    PDF

    View or Download as a PDF file.

    PDF

    eReader

    View online with eReader.

    eReader

    Figures

    Tables

    Media

    Share

    Share

    Share this Publication link

    Share on social media