An Indoor Localization System Based on BLE Mesh Network

Sammanfattning:  Internet of Things (iot) is a growing field enabled by many different technologies. One of these technologies is  Bluetooth Low Energy (ble). It is of interest to investigate the potential of ble and one interesting, currently unsupported, feature is mesh networking. This thesis work aims to investigate whether it is possible to design and implement a mesh network protocol using ble. To verify the implemented mesh network protocols functionality an indoor localization system has been implemented upon the BLE mesh network protocol. Furthermore this thesis work investigates if an indoor localization system can benefit from using a mesh network. The results of the investigation is a proof of concept of a functional ble mesh network protocol implemented on hardware and tested in a real environment. Tests show that the implemented localization system has similar accuracy as other rssi based indoor localization systems. The largest advantage found for a mesh based indoor localization is the ability to localize objects outside of the radio propagation range of the user. This feature is enabled by multi-hop messaging in the mesh network.