A Lateration Method based on Effective Combinatorial Beacon Selection for Bluetooth Low Energy Indoor Positioning

Nowadays, the Bluetooth Low Energy (BLE) technology joined with the Received Signal Strength Indicator technique has became a popular approach in Indoor Positioning System, thanks to the wide availability of BLE in anchors and wearable devices and the straightforward implementation of both. Consequently, methods based on geometric properties of anchors, as lateration, are capable of enhancing the positioning accuracy exploiting the growing availability of anchors and their rich geometric distribution in indoor environments. On the downside, an inappropriate selection of anchors decreases the positioning accuracy estimation. Therefore, integrating an effective beacon selection method can enhance the reliability and accuracy of these methods. In this paper, we present a novel and straightforward Lateration indoor positioning method based on effective combinatorial BLE beacon selection. The combinatorial BLE selection approach relies on a geometrical analysis (difference of triangle areas), of each beacon combination, considering the reference beacons' position with the estimated position using lateration, and with a globally calculated virtual target position as reference. The real-world experiment demonstrated that the proposed method improves the traditional lateration with 5% to 16%, considering different evaluation metrics.