A stigmergic approach to indoor localization using Bluetooth Low Energy beacons

Localization of people and devices is one of the main building blocks of context aware systems since the user position represents the core information for detecting user's activities, devices activations, proximity to points of interest, etc. While for outdoor scenarios Global Positioning System (GPS) constitutes a reliable and easily available technology, for indoor scenarios GPS is largely unavailable. In this paper we present a range-based indoor localization system that exploits the Received Signal Strength (RSS) of Bluetooth Low Energy (BLE) beacon packets broadcast by anchor nodes and received by a BLE-enabled device. The method used to infer the user's position is based on stigmergy. We exploit the stigmergic marking process to create an on-line probability map identifying the user's position in the indoor environment.