Evaluation of Ant's wireless protocol for indoor navigation with RSSI

Abstract: Do we always have to be lost in the halls of a big school on an already stressful first day of class? This paper has evaluated a prototype indoor navigation system that uses a ANT wireless protocol. The protocol has been placed into nodes (small electrical devices, hardware) which are then placed around an area of interest (a map), like beacons, using RSSI (signal from the nodes) to help determine where the subject is located. The mobile application is made specific to Android with a search algorithm that is based off of vector analysis with weighted percentages. The idea being that if the position of each node is available, knowing the location between the nodes should be easily achievable. The nodes were build successfully along with an android application to verify each nodes functionally and see the nodes RSSI values. The algorithm works as expected but due to several factors was not able to be fully realized. In the actual test the system results where slow and did not update in real time. It was found that the ANT protocol does not have a fast packet reception when using the continuous scan feature made available by ANT. The results of the search algorithm were not good enough for a real time indoor navigation prototype. The search algorithm was slow. The system needs more inputs to accurately locate a subject indoors.