Bluetooth indoor location system

System

• Use beacons mounted on stationary objects within a room to allow user supplied devices to triangulate their rough position inside the room
• The users may share their location via various means.
  • XMPP
    • complex
    • relies on external infrastructure eventually
    • robust against network topology traversals (NAT/Firewall)
  • Multicast
    • simple
    • not robust when traversing NATs
• Useful for a conference hall or the like, where an area is large enough to prevent finding ones way or friends easily.

Hardware

SOCs

• Nordic
• TI

Front End/BT modules

• just as expensive as SOCs

Software

Firmware

• bit-bang BTLE library code for reference

Beacon

• Similar use cases
  • Beacon tagging - tags beacon to allow device to find the tagged item
    • iBeacon - proprietary implementation
• Use Proximity Sensing Profile (PXP/FMP) to let user devices know where and roughly how far they are from the beacons.