Bluetooth-based Indoor Positioning through ToF and RSSI Data Fusion

After several decades of both market and scientific interest, indoor positioning is still a hot and not completely solved topic, fostered by the advancement of technology, pervasive market penetration of mobile devices and novel communication standards. In this work, we propose a two-step model-based indoor positioning algorithm based on Bluetooth Low-Energy, a pervasive and energy efficient standard protocol. In the first (i.e. ranging) step a Kalman Filter (KF) performs the fusion of both RSSI and Time-of-Flight measurement data. Thus, we demonstrate the benefit of not relying only on RSSI, comparing ranging performed with or without the help of ToF. In the second (i.e. positioning) step, the distance estimates from multiple anchors are combined into a quadratic cost function, which is minimized to determine the coordinates of the target node in a planar reference frame. The proposed solution is tailored to reduce the computational effort and target real-time execution on an embedded platform, demonstrating a limited loss of performance. The paper presents an experimental setup and discusses meaningful results, demonstrating a robust BLE-based indoor positioning solution for embedded systems.