Evaluating a Novel Bluetooth 5.1 AoA Approach for Low-Cost Indoor Vehicle Tracking via Simulation

The recent Bluetooth 5.1 specification introduced the use of Angle-of-Arrival (AoA) information which enables the design of novel low-cost indoor positioning systems. Existing approaches rely on multiple fixed gateways equipped with antenna arrays, in order to determine the location of an arbitrary number of simple mobile omni-directional emitters. In this paper, we instead present an approach where mobile receivers are equipped with antenna arrays, and the fixed infrastructure is composed of battery-powered beacons. We implement a simulator to evaluate the solution using a real-world data set of AoA measurements. We evaluated the solution as a function of the number of beacons, their transmission period, and algorithmic parameters of the position estimation. Sub-meter accuracy is achievable using 1 beacon per 15 m
²
and a beacon transmission period of 500 ms.