Channel Diversity for Indoor Localization Using Bluetooth Low Energy and Extended Advertisements

Bluetooth Low Energy (BLE) is a ubiquitous low-power communication technology used in many applications including location-based services. Typically, in BLE localization, the beacons transmit advertisement messages while moving devices infer their location from radio signal strength measurements. Previous work has noted that three radio channels used for advertisement transmission exhibit different propagation conditions including frequency dependent shadowing and multipath. Because most of the consumer electronic devices report only the measured signal strength value without the number of a channel in which it was measured, the variance of the measurements increases and adversely affects the accuracy of localization. Information on the channel used can improve the localization accuracy, however, the existing approaches are limited to three advertisement channels, ignoring the remaining 37 channels available in BLE communication. This article analyses the impact of channel diversity on the accuracy of BLE-based indoor localization. In contrast to previous work, we use signal strength measurements from all 40 channels and show that channel diversity can significantly improve the localization accuracy. Experiments conducted in 100m(2) office area show that using signal strength measurements in 40 channels improves the average localization accuracy by approximately 50% and 20% compared to the use of 3 channels without and with information on the channel used, respectively. Overhead of the proposed method can be reduced through careful selection of the radio channels used in measurements. We propose a channel selection method which allows to significantly improve the localization accuracy using measurements collected from between 10 and 15 channels.