Help with a indoor positioning system based on bluetooth

Hello, i am doing an indoor positioning system based on MATLAB and I need to configure the signal that my phone generates and the antennas which receives the signal. They are Belkin Antennas.

Can anybody help me? I am not sure how should I configure my enviroment in MATLAB.

The system has 6 antennas and i need to measure the RSSI in 84 differents points in a 15x7m room. How should I configure the antennas? Is there any functions? I was reading about RF Toolbox and Antenna Toolbox but I couldn´t find anything.

Thanks for your help!

[Walter Roberson]

Are you sure it is bluetooth you are talking about? Multiple antennae and RSSI are usually referred to in connection with WiFi 802.11n or later, rather than bluetooth.

[John BG]

Bluetooth is quite short range, don't you mean WiFi?

There are already applications of limited success using wifi for indoor positioning.

[Walter Roberson]

Some of the applications for using wifi for indoor positioning can get pretty accurate. There was one announced a couple of months ago that can be used to track people through walls by the way the wifi signal is diminished as they pass through.

Bluetooth is short range, up to something like 15 feet for signals. But that is for the case where you need to be able to get understandable signals at a particular data rate. If you were just using the bluetooth as a radio frequency source in a convenient band, and were just reading off the RSSI from the antennae (perhaps through a wired connection) then you could use bluetooth for triangulation and tracking to a wider distance.

[MOHIT]

can you suggest how to do it using wifi?

[Walter Roberson]

MOHIT, what is it that your project needs to achieve?

[John BG]

there are proprietary solutions already in the market used by big companies to track staff in premises like warehouses, offices and stores.

Large stores of all sorts have been using it for a while to track customers along aisles and know what products get more attention or what products should be brought closer to entrance, or more what other products require more, or can afford less shelf face space.

With the RF signal strength you can know that a wifi terminal may be in any of the points of a circle, or a within 2 circles (doughnut).

With different base stations you then draw different doughnut for same wifi terminal and therefore you locate the position.

Since people walk quite slow compared to cars, if you update every half second you are going to get pretty accurate traces.

Smart phones also actually send their location to mobile base stations, that on walking into private property, like stores, you tacitly agree to disclose.

If you want to develop a commercial product, you may want to consider first a bit of market research, and find out already available products, hardware and software, at what price they sell out, and you will get an idea of how much each of your units should cost, and from there how much time you want to invest.

if it's and academic project, then may be you would like to consider building a networks of 2 or 3 wifi 'base stations' a few test terminals and in a controlled environment measure signal strengths and delays.

regards

John BG

<mailto:[e-mail] [e-mail]>