Does BTLE measure up against WiFi? A comparison of indoor location performance

Abstract

Bluetooth low energy(BTLE) is an emerging lowpower wireless communication technology which is expected to be of great potential in the next few years. In this paper, we propose several empirical propagation models for BTLE in different conditions: indoor/outdoor, line-of-sight (LOS) / non-line-of-sight (NLOS). Then we compare the propagation characteristics between BTLE and WiFi. It is demonstrated in our experiments that BTLE propagation model can better relate RSSI to range than WiFi, which indicates that BTLE can be more accurate when used in localization scenarios. Extensive experiments in indoor environments have been conducted to explicitly compare the localization accuracy between BTLE and WiFi with nearly identical external environments and conditions. BTLE is proved to be more accurate than WiFi by around 27 percent. We also discuss various underlying reasons why BTLE outperforms WiFi in localization scenarios. We believe that such an accurate and low-cost technique will enable practical and ubiquitous indoor localization.