Using Bluetooth to Implement a Pervasive Indoor Positioning System with Minimal Requirements at the Application Level

Abstract

Different systems have been proposed to estimate the position of a mobile device using Bluetooth based on metrics such as the Radio Signal Strength Indicator (RSSI), the received Bit Error Rate (BER) or the Cellular Signal Quality (CSQ). These systems try to improve the estimation accuracy of the basic and straightforward triangulation method among discovered BT reference base stations at the cost of requiring that the positioning application has access to low level hardware related data (provided by the Host Controller Interface) and obtaining information which is in many cases hardware, and therefore device, dependent. In this paper we design, simulate, implement and validate a Bluetooth positioning system that only requires the ability to handle SDP service records at the application level, achieving mean errors around 1 to 3 meters, improving the basic triangulation method among discovered BT reference base stations.