This ia a project on BLE beaconing based indoor localization. There are many techniques that are used to identify a location on a map with the improvement of technology. In addition the significant and popularity of indoor navigation has increased in the recent past. So our purpose is studying the concept of indoor navigation. Here we use BLE beacons for that. Then BLE messages are scanned using the arduino ESP32 module. Then those data are uploaded to a MQTT server under a given topic using an access point. Then we collect a data set and hope to train that data set for finding out the correct location.
Bluetooth Low Energy (BLE) or Bluetooth Smart, is the low power- version of Bluetooth that was developed for the Internet of Things (IoT) and was introduced as part of the Bluetooth 4.0 core specification. BLE was originally developed by Nokia as an in-house project called 'Wibree' and soon after was adopted by the Bluetooth SIG. Bluetooth LE uses a 2.4 GHz unlicensed radio band to interconnect nearby devices. It provides a data rate of up to 1 Mbps while consuming just 0.01 to 0.5 watts.
MQTT stands for MQ Telemetry Transport. It is a publish/subscribe, extremely simple and lightweight messaging protocol, designed for constrained devices and low-bandwidth, high-latency or unreliable networks. The design principles are to minimise network bandwidth and device resource requirements whilst also attempting to ensure reliability and some degree of assurance of delivery. These principles also turn out to make the protocol ideal of the emerging “machine-to-machine” (M2M) or “Internet of Things” world of connected devices, and for mobile applications where bandwidth and battery power are at a premium. The MQTT protocol defines two types of network entities: a message broker and a number of clients. An MQTT broker is a server that receives all messages from the clients and then routes the messages to the appropriate destination clients. An MQTT client is any device (from a micro controller up to a full-fledged server) that runs an MQTT library and connects to an MQTT broker over a network.
ESP-32 is a low-cost, low-power system on a chip (SoC) series with Wi-Fi and dual mode Bluetooth (Bluetooth Classic and Bluetooth Low Energy) capabilities. It can perform as a complete standalone system or as a slave device to a host MCU, reducing communication stack overhead on the main application processor. In this device there are SPI/SDIO or I2C/UART interfaces to enable Wi-Fi and Bluetooth functionalities between devices. There are different types of ESP32 Boards such as DOIT DEVKIT V1, ESP32 DeV Kit, ESP-32S NodeMCU, ESP32 Thing, WEMOS LOLIN32, “WeMos” OLED, HUZZAH32 etc. Among them we used DOIT DEVKIT V1 board for our project which has following,
specifications:
- Number of cores: 2 (dual core)
- Wi-Fi: 2.4 GHz up to 150 Mbits/s
- Bluetooth: BLE (Bluetooth Low Energy) and legacy Bluetooth
- Architecture: 32 bits
- Clock frequency: Up to 240 MHz
- RAM: 512 KB
- Pins: 30 (version with 30 GPIOs)
- Peripherals: Capacitive touch, ADC (analog to digital converter), DAC (digital to analog converter), I2C (Inter-Integrated Circuit), UART (universal asynchronous receiver/transmitter), CAN 2.0 (Controller Area Network), SPI (Serial Peripheral Interface), I2S (Integrated Inter-IC Sound), RMII (Reduced Media-Independent Interface), PWM (pulse width modulation), and more.
