Development of a Beacon and GPS based localization and seamless navigation system

Abstract

With the proliferation of mobile computing devices and wireless communication technologies, the demand for fast and accurate Location Based Services (LBSs) has been extensively spurred in these decades. When roaming outdoors, users can use GPS to obtain precise location, but indoors, because of the lack of sight (LOS) channels, GPS often fails for reliable locating. Therefore, IPS has been a research area of great interests since the past two decades. Extensive researches have been conducted in the area of indoor location. However, most of the researches are limited to the hypothesis that the operating condition is either outdoors or indoors, which hardly holds in reality. There exist some areas share the partial characteristics of both outdoor and indoor environments, such as the areas adjoining to buildings (covered corridor) or semi-open buildings (parking lots). These areas possess few LOS channels to the satellites while the wireless signals for IPS are not covered. Thus, utilizing unitary environment location strategy for these areas is incapable of providing reliable location information. In the meanwhile, a precise IO detection is fundamental for upper-layer applications to serve individual users, e.g., applications can leverage contextual status to dominate the status of on-board sensors for battery saving. The IO information is also vital for a seamless navigation system. In this dissertation, we propose a seamless navigation system based on GPS and iBeacon. The system is capable of providing precise and fast response IO detection as well as seamless navigation with low power consumption. IO detection is performed with several Beacons deployed at the landmarks of semi-outdoor environment (e.g., covering corridors and conjunctions of buildings), such as the entrances/exits. Each Beacon is capable of providing differentiable distance information within 6.5 meters; thus, the Beacons are placed with sparse intensity in semi-outdoors. For outdoor environment, the system only leveraged GPS for location service and thus other sensors are turned off. The transition from outdoor to semi-outdoor environment is based on the decreasing amplitude of average GPS signals; Bluetooth sensor will be activated for semi-outdoor navigation while GPS module is turned off for battery saving. The system is implemented on an Android mobile device and several experiments have been conducted to evaluate the system. The experiment results have validated that the system is capable of providing IO detection and LBS with high accuracy and the power consumption is acceptable at the same time.