Low-cost System with Handheld Analyzer for Optimizing the Position of Indoor Base Stations

Abstract

In this paper, an automatic system of locating the indoor area with weak or no mobile signal was proposed and demonstrated experimentally by using the Internet of Things (IoT) technology. Nowadays, the technicians of mobile services providers need to go along with numerous heavy equipment to measure and record the mobile signal strength at outside environment. Recently, there are systems proposed to do such measurement at outdoor area by using the IoT technology automatically. However, these works could not be applied in the indoor area since there are difficulties to do the indoor mapping and positioning. In this work, the Bluetooth Low Energy (BLE) was used to tackle these two difficulties. After a proper placement of BLE in the testing site, while the technician walk around with a handheld analyzer, the data can be obtained accordingly for further analysis in the proposed system which includes the construction of floor plan, detection of mobile signal strength and suggestion of indoor base stations. The gift wrapping and centroid algorithms were used during the analysis. The experimental results showed that the proposed system successfully demonstrated the indoor mapping, positioning of weak mobile signal area and suggestion of indoor base stations for the normal rectangular rooms with an area of 100 m 2 on single floor.