Proposing an Extended iBeacon System for Indoor Route Guidance

This paper presents a concept of an extended iBeacon system for indoor navigation and guidance. iBeacon is a proximal wireless notification service proposed by Apple, Inc. This service uses beacon modules emitting radio waves based on Bluetooth Low Energy technology and provides automatic triggering of a single notification from a beacon module to multiple smartphones at proximity. In usual iBeacon systems, there is one-to-one correspondence between notification and beacon module. However, if we introduce a memory to remember the history of iBeacon detection, iBeacon systems can be extended to handle multiple notifications by multiple beacon modules with awareness of some contexts of pedestrians´ moving directions, which enables a guide, for example, to the exit of buildings. We explain this idea for indoor route guidance using iBeacon and discuss its implementation with our simple experiment and performance evaluation.