Design and Analysis of a Bluetooth-Based Indoor Localization System

The emerging context-aware applications relying on the wireless networking, require the availability of network services that provide even simple notions of context as position and identity. In the last few years several localization and tracking systems for indoor environment have been proposed. However, these systems are often very expensive since they require the installation of dedicated infrastructures of sensors based on radio, ultrasound or infrared technologies, to determine the user position. This paper aims to propose and analyze a novel indoor localization and tracking system based on the Bluetooth technology. This is a short-range, low complexity and low cost wireless technology that supports explicit device discovery services. The proposed localization system fully integrates these device discovery procedures into the infrastructure-based network of Bluetooth access points that provides the wireless connectivity inside a building. This design approach guarantees a cost-effective solution for the positioning service implementation. In this paper we have extensively investigated through simulative analysis the performances of the proposed localization system, showing that it has a negligible overhead, still providing a timely update of user location.