A Multiple BLE Beacon Approach for Tracking in Industrial Environments

Developing an Indoor Positioning System (IPS) for an industrial environment is a challenging task in its attempt to balance accuracy, cost, maintainability, and scalability. In many cases, sub-meter accuracy is not essential, allowing the use of less accurate yet more cost-effective technologies, such as Received Signal Strength Indicator (RSSI)-based positioning using Bluetooth Low Energy (BLE). While the common approach involves assigning one BLE beacon per target, utilizing multiple beacons can enhance both accuracy and system robustness, with no significant extra cost. We investigate the performance differences between single-beacon and multi-beacon setups using fingerprinting and multilateration algorithms in the context of a real-world. Our results show that fingerprinting with multiple beacons yields the best performance, achieving an average accuracy of 2.18m. Although multilateration offers slightly lower accuracy, it avoids the need to build and maintain a Radio Map, providing a balance between performance and deployment simplicity.