Indoor Positioning System with Grouping Strategy of BLE Advertising Packets

Bluetooth low energy (BLE) uses a received signal strength indicator (RSSI) for indoor positioning. The primary goal of using RSSI is to provide the estimated position at the indoor positioning system. BLE consists of 40 channels in 2.4 GHz, where each channel is separated by 2 MHz. Three among the 40 channels are utilized as advertising channels labelled 37, 38, and 39 with center frequencies of 2402, 2426, and 2480 (in MHz). These frequencies suffer from nonlinear nature of path losses and fluctuation of signal strength. Therefore, this study proposes a BLE-based indoor positioning system to stabilize RSSI using the grouping strategy of advertising packets. Results show that the proposed approach enhances the system performance in terms of distance error.