Indoor Positioning System (IPS) Using ESP32, MQTT and Bluetooth

Abstract

The global positioning system [GPS] is and has always been the best positioning system for outdoors, but this positioning system would fail in indoor because of no line-of-sight and disadvantages of signal propagation through walls. Hence, we have selected bluetooth low energy (BLE) based indoor positioning system (IPS), where BLE is an emerging wireless technology developed for short-range communication with which the battery longevity is preferred over high data transfer speed. Here, the proposed work demonstrates the implementation of IPS using MQTT protocol, ESP32 modules, and a BLE device. The work mainly focuses on the usage of indoor positioning for asset-tracking, in this case, a person with the BLE Beacon inside the campus premises. Message queuing telemetry transport (MQTT) is an immensely lightweight publish/subscribe based messaging transport, used to set up communication between ESP32 modules and the server. Also, the paper provides experimental flow and results performed using BLE beacon as a tracking device and ESP32 modules as the scanning stations.