Description
A BLE beacon is a small battery-powered (typically coin-cell) device that broadcasts BLE advertisements at a fixed cadence (100 ms-10 s) carrying an iBeacon or Eddystone payload. They are the canonical hardware for indoor BLE localization: any nearby smartphone or BLE scanner reads RSSI per beacon and triangulates / fingerprints. In the thesis architecture, BLE beacons (combined with smartphone-side scanning or anchored BLE collectors) provide the calibrated ground-truth density and trajectory data that the CSI pipeline is regressed against. Beacons are deployed in the monitored area at known coordinates.
Specs / capabilities
- BLE 4.0+ advertising channels (37, 38, 39)
- Configurable TX power (-40 to +4 dBm typical) and advertising interval (100 ms-10 s)
- iBeacon: UUID + major + minor (16 bytes)
- Eddystone: UID, URL, TLM (telemetry), EID (encrypted) frame variants
- 1-3 year battery life on CR2032 at 1 s interval
- Cost ~$5-20 per unit
Tooling
- iBeacon spec (Apple, 2013)
- Eddystone spec (Google, 2015)
- Vendor SDKs: Estimote, Kontakt.io, Aruba Meridian, Minew
- Beacon configuration usually via mobile companion app
Used by (papers)
- Indoor BLE localization papers (RSSI fingerprinting baseline)
- Crowd-counting / proximity-tracing studies
- BLE-calibrated CSI (thesis future direction)