A Building/Environment Data Based Indoor Positioning Service

In addition to being able to provide accurate location information, indoor positioning services/systems (IPS) for large public buildings/facilities should be easy to deploy and maintain, stay scalable in response to surges in crowd density and location queries, minimize the capabilities required of user devices to use the service and degrade gracefully to be disaster resilient. This paper describes an IPS with these attributes. It is called BeDIPS (Building/environment Data-based Indoor Positioning System). Location beacons used by the system to deliver location information to users are simple Bluetooth Smart Ready devices. The paper describes the architecture, design and proof-of-concept prototypes of BeDIPS and the development tools to support its design, deployment and maintenance.