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It's a few days i'm trying to build an app for indoor location of a user in to a room. I'm using Estimote SDK . I had BAD results even if I tried many altrenatives. I used, thrilateration, quadrilateration, some alhgoritms based on media and variance(made by myself) trying to reduce the noise... I had unsatisfactories results (too wide fluctuations in very small range time) and i'm wondering if someone had any good experience in this kind of applications. I know that results are good with IOS and I'm wondering if is it possible to replicate them in android system and if somone did...and could eventually help me.

Thanks,

Federico.

Federico Pinciaroli
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  • [David Young](https://stackoverflow.com/users/1461050/davidgyoung) has written about trying to replicate the iOS behaviour in the [Understanding ibeacon distancing](https://stackoverflow.com/questions/20416218/understanding-ibeacon-distancing) SO question and in more detail in the [Fundamentals of Beacon Ranging](http://developer.radiusnetworks.com/2014/12/04/fundamentals-of-beacon-ranging.html) blog post on the Radius Network website. – Markus Kauppinen Oct 20 '16 at 09:39
  • Thanks Makus, I already read both! They are very interesting and inherent... I found a lot of theory and no pratice implementations. My doubts about feasibility remains. That's why i'm asking if someone had some good results in it...thank you. – Federico Pinciaroli Oct 20 '16 at 17:31

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My personal opinion from experience I am building is that BLE beacons are not designed to easily provide location. They are only designed to provide "presence" ie. "you are near a point". And by near it means within a few metres, so that the signal is strong and you can be sure of being nearby. (Although I'm not convinced they are reliable even for that)

There are several companies that are doing trilateration or similar to get better accuracy out of multiple beacons, such as:

It seems from their publicity that they have this working. So it must be possible, but I suppose there is a lot of trial and error in getting practical algorithms, and a signal strength survey of the venue seems to be needed. I have not been able to find any unbiassed/independent review of these systems.

O'Rooney
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the fact is that ibeacon (i tried on ios with estimote earliest release) have RSSI no affidable. The fact is that you should not use it for detecting distance in meters but in "zones" like near, far, ecc

Alberto Cappellina
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  • I thanks, i know, but i even know that ibeacons are are quite reliable with IOS (due to their nature) and i 'm wondering if i could have similar results with android... – Federico Pinciaroli Oct 20 '16 at 09:27
  • have you tried to ask them (estimote firm) if there are some differences betweens response (RSSI) with two platforms? those values should be the same if the beacons are the same – Alberto Cappellina Oct 20 '16 at 09:31
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    @federico, in what way do you find that iBeacons are more reliable with iOS? iOS doesn't have different technology, it's still the same BLE hardware. – O'Rooney Nov 03 '16 at 03:50
  • Hm, I've since learned that although the hardware might be the same, the bluetooth stacks in iOS and Android are radically different. Up to Android 4.4, it used BlueZ stack and had a lot of problems. With 5.0 Google wrote their own stack and it got a lot better. – O'Rooney Feb 07 '17 at 21:04