BLE-Based Indoor Tracking System with Overlapping-Resistant IoT Solution for Tourism Applications

In this paper, an overlapping-resistant Internet of Things (IoT) solution for a Bluetooth Low Energy (BLE)-based indoor tracking system (BLE-ITS) is presented. The BLE-ITS is a promising, inexpensive alternative to the well-known GPS. It can be used in human traffic analysis, such as indoor tourist facilities. Tourists or other customers are tagged by a unique MAC address assigned to a simple and energy-saving BLE beacon emitter. Their location is determined by a distributed and scalable network of popular Raspberry Pi microcomputers equipped with BLE and WiFi/Ethernet modules. Only simple triggered messages in the form of login records (LRs) are sent to a server, where the so-called path vectors (PVs) and interest profile (IPr) are set. The authors implemented the prototype and demonstrated its usefulness in a controlled environment. As it is shown in the paper, the solution is highly overlap-resistant and mitigates the so-called multilocation problem.