Reliability evaluation of iBeacon for micro-localization

Bluetooth Low Energy (BLE) enabled iBeacon is a low-power device and is suitable for many proximity and location-based applications. Micro-localization refers to the phenomena of tracking a target with high accuracy, which is an integral part of location-aware applications, both indoor and outdoor. Although many approaches towards localization have already been proposed in many research works, Received Signal Strength Identification (RSSI) based localization using the latest BLE technology is comparatively a new concept and it reduces the energy requirements of such applications. But RSSI based distance calculation provide only a rough estimation of the proximity and does not give an accurate result for micro-localization. This paper presents and evaluates a computationally simple method for micro-localization of an object from the RSSI values from a collection of iBeacons so the method can be used in devices with very low processing power. Among the different scenarios the experiments were conducted, most of them resulted in localization error of less than 1m.