A proximity-based indoor navigation system tackling the COVID-19 social distancing measures

The emergency we are experiencing due to the coronavirus infection is changing the role of technologies in our daily life. In particular, movements of persons need to be monitored or driven for avoiding gathering of people, especially in small environments. In this paper, we present an efficient and cost-effective indoor navigation system for driving people inside large smart buildings. Our solution takes advantage of an emerging short-range wireless communication technology - IoT-based Bluetooth Low Energy (BLE), and exploits BLE Beacons across the environment to provide mobile users equipped with a smartphone hints on how to arrive at the destination. The main scientific contribution of our work is a new proximity-based navigation system that identifies the user position according to information sent by Beacons, processes the best path for indoor navigation at the edge computing infrastructure, and provides it to the user through the smartphone. We provide some experimental results to test the communication system considering both the Received Signal Strength Indicator (RSSI) and the Mean Opinion Score (MOS).