BOSSA: A Bluetooth-based System for Discovering Indoor Location

BOSSA stands for BlueTooth and Sensors Array. It is a platform that developers can use to create applications that require the indoor location of an enduser in a multistory building. An array of BlueTooth Low Energy (BLE) beacons is the source of signals that are discovered by the end-user's smartphone when the application is invoked. A cloud-based database contains he idenities and locations of each member of the BLE beacon array. APIs associated with the database calculate the user's location using a trilateration technique wih sufficient accuracy to support many applications. Students and faulty have created several applications that use the location information derived from the BOSSA Platform. Locating an emergency caller in a multistory building is one application that uses the platform. Papers describing the solution are listed below.

This project was investigated in the RTC Lab and in classroom buildings on the IIT Main Campus in Chicago. The project resulted in the following publications.