Contact Information-Based Indoor Pedestrian Localization Using Bluetooth Low Energy Beacons

Indoor localization technologies are actively investigated to realize location-based applications in various environments, and indoor localization methods based on whether the received signal strength indicator (RSSI) is less than a threshold have been proposed previously. Such a proximity/non-proximity binary value is used in digital contact tracing applications to reduce the coronavirus disease effects. We proposed two indoor pedestrian localization methods based on contact information using bluetooth low energy (BLE) beacons, namely multilateration and cooperative localization. This study attempts to demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed methods using only contact information. Through simulation experiments, we found that the proposed methods can achieve comparable accuracy to existing methods when the attenuation model is accurate. The difference in average localization error was 0.1 m between the proposed method 1 and range-based method, and 0.2 m between the proposed method 2 and fingerprinting method. We confirmed that the proposed methods using only contact information are robust against environmental changes even when the attenuation model is inaccurate. We consider that these contributions have added a new perspective on the use of contact information in the field of indoor localization, which aims to realize power-saving and cost reduction.