Lightweight IoT based indoor positioning for guard touring system

Abstract

An Indoor Positioning System (IPS) with Internet of Things (IoT) platform for a Guard Touring System (GTS) application is developed to track in real-time the guards’ whereabouts in an indoor setting when they perform their patrolling duties. The developed system comprises of Bluetooth Low Energy (BLE) beacons, mobile application and Node-RED IoT platform. BLE beacons are used to collect position data. The position information from the beacons captured by the developed mobile phone application is then transmitted using MQTT broker service to reach the Node-RED cloud platform for analysis of the information and generating a real-time end-user display dashboard. The real-time position data is also stored in MongoDB database platform for future reference. Two methods are used to estimate the indoor positioning of the guards which are machine learning using Linear Regression model and BLE Media Access Control (MAC) Identifier. The findings show the BLE MAC Identifier method provides a high accuracy of 98% and the least delay in decision time, which can be as fast as 0.5 s. The method is also more cost-effective as it uses lesser number of devices to achieve high accuracy indoor positioning estimation.