A MOBILE INDOOR POSITIONING SYSTEM IN MUSEUM BY USING IBEACON

1TAN-WEI CHOU, 2WEI-WEN HUNG

1,2Department of Electronic Engineering, Ming Chi University of Technology, New Taipei City 24301, Taiwan E-mail: [email protected], [email protected]

Abstract— The iBeacon technology which is based on Low Energy (BLE) technology is introduced by Apple in 2013. This technology has been widely used in shopping malls to provide customers with information of merchandize and promotion activities. Here we apply this technology in museums to provide visitors with information or introductions of the exhibits, and it comes with higher convenience and efficiency of tour guidance. With location information staff members of museums can provide inquiry information and immediate assist for those in need. Except the architecture of the application mentioned above, this study also discusses the problem of signal attenuation when someone is crossing.

Index Term— iBeacon, indoor positioning, .

I. INTRODUCTION With iBeacon, Apple has standardized the format for BLE Advertising. Under this format, an advertising In recent year, with the widespread usage of network packet consists of four main pieces of information. technology, the ways of sharing and experiencing The iBeacon’s format includes a 16-bytes long knowledge and information have been altered and universally unique identifier (UUID) that is used to become smarter. Nowadays, smart tour-guidance identify different companies which would have their services are provided in many museums that enable own iBeacon deployment. There are still three parts visitors to get variety of detailed information of the in the format including a Major value, a Minor value exhibits through mobile devices. The present study and a TX power. For this study, Mayor is assigned for uses the application with indoor location positioning distinct exhibition halls and Minor is assigned for to provide visitors with instant tour-guidance and thus specific exhibition areas. The beacon distance can be visitors can learn efficiently from the exhibition. estimated via values of TX power and RSSI. iBeacon Also, staff members of museums can provide inquiry Data Format shown in figure 1. information and even immediate assist for those in need. The Global Positioning System (GPS) are mostly used in the mobile applications, but the precision of positioning is decreased due to the attenuation of signal strength that is caused by the construction material of buildings. More and more indoor positioning technologies are consequently proposed. The indoor positioning technology is mainly based on the wireless sensing networking including technologies such as WiFi, Zigbee, RFID and Bluetooth, etc. This study utilizes the Apple’s Figure 1: iBeacon Data Format iBeacon technology, a Bluetooth Low Energy (BLE) technology. The iBeacon technology is powerful in For iBeacon technology in iOS 7 introduced by phone endurance, and it’s inexpensive and easy to Apple, how far a mobile device is from a beacon is configure and deploy. Besides, the iBeacon’s simply classified into three levels as less than 10 technology is iOS 7 compatible and Android 4.3 or centimeter “immediate”, less than 1 meter “near” and above compatible. more than 1 meter “far”. The reason of doing so is that the RSSI signal level (known as Received Signal II. METHOD Strength Indicator or RSSI) in theory is decreased at a distance less than 1 meter and it might fluctuate. That A. IBeacon : is to say, RSSI signal level is unable to predict and The iBeacon technology, developed by Apple and just classified as “far”. introduced at the Apple Worldwide Developers Conference (WWDC) in 2013, is one kind of location B. Description of operation of the application positioning technology with implementation of Thermal Fatigue Test : Bluetooth Low Energy (BLE) technology. It regularly On the staff members side, staff members use the broadcasts advertising packets that will be analyzed application to obtain location information. This and sent to the application to obtain location application automatically collects signals from positioning information. adjacent beacons and figures out the location using

Proceedings of 15th Research World International Conference, Taipei, Taiwan, 7th May 2016, ISBN: 978-93-86083-04-3 17 A Mobile Indoor Positioning System in Museum by Using iBeacon RSSI values. Those iBeacon signals and RSSI values are to be sent to the server via HTTP protocol. The application can also be used for staff members to punch in and out. Process flow as shown is figure 2.

Figure 4: The iBeacon device

As illustrated in figure 5, there are 15 points deployed on the walls, in the second-floor of the building of department of electronics of Ming Chi University of Technology, with the distance 10m point to point and each 1.8m high above the ground. The frequency of iBeacon transmission is 1 packet/s and 30 seconds will be taken for calculating the location of each point. The measurement is performed by holding a mobile in a fixed location for one Figure 2: Staff’s process flow minute.

On the visitors side, after scanning ibeacons the application transfers the corresponding Major and Minor to the server and information of nearby exhibits around visitors will be pushed into their mobile devices. Every 5 minutes the application acquires data from the server and then locates the position of staff members.Process flow as shown is figure 3.

Figure 5: iBeacon deployment

III. RESULTS

A. iBeacon Deployment : The signals are sampled 10 times for one period in an open area for reference. It’s found that the error ratio will be 17% for the distance 1m between iBeacon point and mobile, 25% for the distance 5m between iBeacon point and mobile and 27% for the distance 10m between iBeacon point and mobile, as shown in figure 6. Therefore, due to the cost of deployment and the precision, 10m is taken as the distance between points for further analysis.

Figure 3:Visitors’ process flow

C. Experiment : To evaluate the precision of the location positioning for the present study, TICC2541 system-on-chip (SoC) solution for Bluetooth low energy (BLE) is utilized. The iBeacon device as shown is figure 4. Figure 6:iBeacon point and mobile

Proceedings of 15th Research World International Conference, Taipei, Taiwan, 7th May 2016, ISBN: 978-93-86083-04-3 18 A Mobile Indoor Positioning System in Museum by Using iBeacon B. The measurement with someone crossing : CONCLUSION In the experiment, it’s found that RSSI value would dramatically drop when someone is crossing the It’s well known that the benefit of indoor location iBeacon point and the mobile, and it causes the error positioning relies on the design of the application and of location positioning. In the figure 7, curve A is the system architecture. In this study, we implement the signal result for normal case with no person crossing indoor location positioning of staff and also the and averaged RSSI value is -78dBm, and curve B is application capable of pushing of exhibition the signal result for the case with person crossing and information to visitors and further aim at promoting averaged RSSI value is -82dBm. the efficiency of visitors’ experience for new knowledge. The precision of the location positioning tends to be higher in ideal case with no someone- crossing but in the practical use there exist uncertain environmental interference to signal such as the movement of staff. Though we have lower down the error ratio 4 percentage points, how to improve the precision for the location positioning system in different environments still needs more research in the further study .

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS This research is primarily sponsored by the AVTECH.

Figure 7:iBeacon point and mobile REFERENCES

To reduce the effect for the case that someone is [1] Zhiqiang HE, Binyue CUI, Wei ZHOU, Shigeki YOKOI, crossing, the sampling period is increased from 10s to “A proposal of interaction system between visitor and 30s. In figure 8, averaged RSSI value is -77dBm in collection in museum hall by iBeacon”, Computer Science normal case (curve C) and averaged RSSI value is - & Education July 22-24, 2015,. 78dBm in someone-crossing case (curve D). [2] Xin-Yu Lin, Te-Wei Ho, Cheng-Chung Fang, Zui-Shen Yen, Bey-Jing Yang,FeipeiLai,“A Mobile Indoor Positioning System Based on iBeaconTechnology”,Engineering in Medicine and Biology Society (EMBC), pp.4970 - 4973, 25-29 Aug. 2015. [3] HadisKakanejadiFard, Yuanzhu Chen, and Kyung Kook Son,“Indoor Positioning of Mobile Devices with Agile iBeaconDeployment”,Electrical and Computer Engineering (CCECE), pp.275 - 279, 3-6 May 2015 [4] Apple Inc., "iOS: Understanding iBeacon," available: http://support.apple.comlkb/HT6048.. [5] Adel Thaljaoui ,Thierry Val , NejahNasri , Damien Brulin, “BLE localization using RSSI measurements and iRingLA”, Industrial Technology (ICIT), pp.2178 - 2183, 17-19 March 2015.. [6] T. I. Chowdhury ,M. M. Rahman , Sadre-AlaParvez , A. K. M. M. Alam , Abul Basher , AbusayeedAlam , ShahriarRizwan, “A multi-step approach for RSSi-based distance estimation using ”, Networking Systems and Security (NSysS), pp.1 - 5, 5-7 Jan. 2015. Figure 8.Sampling period 30s

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Proceedings of 15th Research World International Conference, Taipei, Taiwan, 7th May 2016, ISBN: 978-93-86083-04-3 19