A Literature Review on Outdoor Localization Systems based on the Bluetooth Technology

Outdoor localization systems are becoming increasingly popular today. Companies and industrial plants need to track both people and things in order to improve their services and organize their security systems. As a result, these systems are of interest in the Internet of Things field, where various technologies are compared to build solutions that offer a balance of resources cost and performance in each situation. In this perspective, Bluetooth is considered a good choice. It is the most widely used wireless technology today, and systems based on this technology are efficient and effective. The different version of the Bluetooth standards proposed localization techniques that can be successfully used in an outdoor localization scenario. Furthermore, with the release 5.1 of the Bluetooth Low Energy standard and with the introduction of the Bluetooth Mesh protocol, new opportunities for a variety of applications have emerged. This paper proposes a review of the literature in which Bluetooth outdoor localization solutions have been proposed. In this investigation, results related to the use of all more recent Bluetooth standards have been included, and the features of the techniques used for each of these have been discussed.