Abstract
Bluetooth Low Energy (BLE) is a wireless network technology used for transmitting data over short distances. BLE maintains a data transmission range comparable to the regular Bluetooth transmission, but consumes less energy and cost. iBeacon technology refers to BLE mobile devices, which allow mobile applications to receive signals from iBeacons in both indoor and outdoor environments. It is commonly used nowadays for positioning, location services, navigation and marketing, for the sustainable development of smart cities. The applications, however, can be further enhanced for use in many disciplines, such as education, health sector, and exhibitions for disseminating information. This study performed a set of robustness and performance tests on BLE-based iBeacons in the teaching and learning environments to evaluate the performance of iBeacon signals for positioning. During robustness testing, positioning accuracy, signal availability and stability were assessed under different environmental conditions, and the findings suggested pedestrian traffic blocking the line of sight between iBeacon and receiver, causing the most signal attenuations and variation in RSSI. In performance testing, a series of tests was conducted to evaluate the deployment of the iBeacons for positioning; leading to recommendations of iBeacon deployment location, density, transmission interval, fingerprint space interval and collection time in physical learning spaces for sustainable eLearning environments.
Highlights
The deployment of iBeacons is challenging work, which can be affected by numerous factors, e.g., the number of iBeacons, spacing between iBeacons, interference with electronic devices, algorithms used for positioning and environmental conditions
For the sustainable deployment of iBeacons in the future, this paper aims to: (a) evaluate the influences of different environmental factors to iBeacon signals with a series of robustness testing, and (b) evaluate the performance of different deployment settings of iBeacon, i.e., deployment position, deployment density, space interval of fingerprint method, collection time interval of fingerprint method, iBeacon signal transmission interval, venue and crowd condition, with a series of performance testing under the same control environment
The robustness testing indicated the iBeacon signals are relatively stable when the distance between the transmitter and receiver is shorter than 80 m, with the preservation of the line of sight
Summary
Networks (WPAN), which is managed by the Bluetooth Special Interest Group (Bluetooth SIG) [1] It aims at providing short-range communication and data exchange in 2.4 GHz channel as a replacement of the connection between devices with wires [2]. This technology has been commonly used in our daily life, such as in hands-free headsets, wireless mouse and keyboards, and data transfers between smart mobile devices, as well as the wireless control applications in smart homes. Bluetooth Low. Energy (BLE, which started from Bluetooth version 4.0) is a low-cost, low-power protocol that is an extension of the general Bluetooth standard used for wireless communication. It allows short-range wireless communication and significantly reduces power consumption when compared to regular
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