An Indoor Tracking System using iBeacon and Android

Abstract

Context-aware applications use context to provide relevant information and services to users with minimal user intervention with the system. User location is such a context for location-aware services. While in the outdoor location-aware systems Global Positioning System can provide the user location within the accuracy of 20 meters, it lacks to precisely determine user location for indoor tracking systems. Thus, different other techniques and mechanisms have been proposed for indoor tracking systems, such as trilateration, triangulation, fingerprinting etc. However, they have added disadvantages including high cost and high-power consumption. To overcome such problems, iBeacon is a low-cost, low-power solution for such indoor tracking systems. In this paper, we explore the use of iBeacon for user tracking in an indoor user tracking system with a prototype implementation and evaluate the system on some general use cases. The prototype serves as a prelude towards the goal of developing context-aware (in particular, location-aware) applications.