Hybrid Wireless Indoor Positioning System Combining BLE Beacons And Wi-Fi APs

Owing to the escalating social and commercial interest on location-based services (LBS), research and development of indoor positioning systems (IPS) have been extended. Since the global navigation satellite system (GNSS) is not available at indoors, IPS research has been focused with alternative wireless technologies. Among them, Wi-Fi and Bluetooth Low Energy (BLE) have been widely used. In this paper, we discuss the RSS features of Wi-Fi and BLE measured under uniform conditions. Then, we show the typical weighted k-nearest neighbor (Wk-NN) fingerprinting positioning using Wi-Fi and BLE beacon individually for the IPS application. In addition, we propose a hybrid Wk-NN fingerprinting employing both BLE and Wi-Fi signals. The experiments were performed through real field deployments. The obtained results show that distance estimation and fingerprinting positioning accuracy using BLE is moderately better than Wi-Fi under identical AP deployment and signal attenuation condition. In addition, the proposed hybrid method shows better location accuracy compared to the BLE beacon and Wi-Fi when used individually.