Indoor positioning utilizing bluetooth low energy RSSI on LoRa system

Abstract

Indoor positioning systems has become popular in this era where it is a network of devices used to locate people or object especially in indoor environment instead of satellite-based positioning. The satellite-based positioning global positioning system (GPS) signal is affected and loss incurred by the wall of the building causes the GPS lack of precision which leads to large positioning error. As a solution to the indoor area coverage problem, an indoor positioning based on bluetooth low energy (BLE) and long range (LoRa) system utilising the receive signal strength indicator (RSSI) is proposed, designed and tested. In this project, the prototype of indoor positioning system is built using node MCU ESP 32, LoRa nodes and BLE beacons. The node MCU ESP 32 will collect RSSI data from each BLE beacons that deployed at decided position around the area. Then, linear regression algorithm will be used in distance estimation. Next, particle filteris implemented to overcome the multipath fading effect and the trilateration technique is applied to estimate the user’s location. The estimated location is compared to the actual position to analyze the root mean square error (RMSE) and cumulative distribution function (CDF). Based on the experiment result, implementing the particle filter reduces the error of location accuracy. The particle filter achieves accuracy with 90% of the time the location error is lower than 2.6 meters.