Distance Estimation on Moving Object using BLE Beacon

The development of Internet of Things technology has connected the smart things to the Internet, enabling users to interact for different applications such as indoor positioning or location-based notification service. To improve the user experience, an accurate distance estimation is required to ensure the interaction can be delivered precisely. For general beacon-based application, the objects keep moving while they are interacting with the beacons. Therefore, their mobility needs to be considered for distance estimation. In this paper, comprehensive experiments are conducted to study the relationship between distance estimation accuracy and packet received rate from two angels, the beacon advertising interval and the object moving speed. Moreover, an improved distance estimation method using Kalman filter and support vector regression is proposed, which has archived at least 40% improvement comparing to current approaches. The proposed idea is also implemented in real-world application which archive less than 100μs computation time.