A Novel iBeacon Deployment Scheme for Indoor Pedestrian Positioning

With diversified demands for location-based services (LBS), smartphone-based indoor pedestrian positioning becomes a research hotspot in the academic and industrial society. Due to the complexity of the indoor environments and the insufficient accuracy of smartphone inertial sensors, it is still challenging to get an indoor pedestrian positioning solution with stable positioning accuracy and good environmental adaptability. Aiming at this problem, a novel iBeacon deployment scheme for indoor pedestrian is proposed in this paper. Firstly, we introduce an abstract method for complex and diverse plane structures of the indoor environments. Secondly, a mapping function between positioning accuracy and pedestrian walking distance is deduced by error analysis of pedestrian dead-reckoning (PDR) method. Finally, this paper proposes a generation algorithm of iBeacon deployment scheme which not only satisfies the positioning accuracy requirement of LBSs but also greatly reduces the number of deployed iBeacons. We have carried out experimental analysis on three different plane structures of real indoor environments. And it turns out that the proposed iBeacon deployment scheme can help PDR-based indoor pedestrian positioning solutions to achieve breakthrough in indoor environment adaptability.