research-article

Dead on Arrival: An Empirical Study of The Bluetooth 5.1 Positioning System

Authors:

Marco Cominelli,

Francesco GringoliAuthors Info & Claims

WiNTECH '19: Proceedings of the 13th International Workshop on Wireless Network Testbeds, Experimental Evaluation & Characterization

Pages 13 - 20

https://doi.org/10.1145/3349623.3355475

Published: 04 October 2019 Publication History

Abstract

The recently released Bluetooth 5.1 specification introduces fine-grained positioning capabilities in this wireless technology, which is deemed essential to context-/location-based Internet of Things (IoT) applications. In this paper, we evaluate experimentally, for the first time, the accuracy of a positioning system based on the Angle of Arrival (AoA) mechanism adopted by the Bluetooth standard. We first scrutinize the fidelity of angular detection and then assess the feasibility of using angle information from multiple fixed receivers to determine the position of a device. Our results reveal that angular detection is limited to a restricted range. On the other hand, even in a simple deployment with only two antennas per receiver, the AoA-based positioning technique can achieve sub-meter accuracy; yet attaining localization within a few centimeters remains a difficult endeavor. We then demonstrate that a malicious device may be able to easily alter the truthfulness of the measured AoA, by tampering with the packet structure. To counter this protocol weakness, we propose simple remedies that are missing in the standard, but which can be adopted with little effort by manufacturers, to secure the Bluetooth 5.1 positioning system.

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Cited By

Wu WZhou DShen LZhao ZLi CHuang G(2025)TransAoA: Transformer-Based Angle of Arrival Estimation for BLE Indoor LocalizationIEEE Transactions on Instrumentation and Measurement10.1109/TIM.2025.352953574(1-12)Online publication date: 2025
https://doi.org/10.1109/TIM.2025.3529535
Morgan A(2025)On the accuracy of BLE indoor localization systemsComputers and Electrical Engineering10.1016/j.compeleceng.2024.109455118:PBOnline publication date: 7-Jan-2025
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1016/j.compeleceng.2024.109455
Furfari FGirolami MMavilia FBarsocchi P(2025)Indoor localization algorithms based on Angle of Arrival with a benchmark comparisonAd Hoc Networks10.1016/j.adhoc.2024.103691166:COnline publication date: 1-Jan-2025
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1016/j.adhoc.2024.103691
Show More Cited By

Index Terms

Dead on Arrival: An Empirical Study of The Bluetooth 5.1 Positioning System
1. Hardware
  1. Communication hardware, interfaces and storage
    1. Sensor applications and deployments
2. Information systems
  1. Information systems applications
    1. Spatial-temporal systems
      1. Location based services

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cover image ACM Conferences

WiNTECH '19: Proceedings of the 13th International Workshop on Wireless Network Testbeds, Experimental Evaluation & Characterization

October 2019

58 pages

ISBN:9781450369312

DOI:10.1145/3349623

General Chairs:
Yiannis Pefkianakis
Apple, USA
,
Kate Ching-Ju Lin
National Chiao Tung University, Taiwan

Copyright © 2019 ACM.

Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than the author(s) must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected].

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New York, NY, United States

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Published: 04 October 2019

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MobiCom '19

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MobiCom '19: The 25th Annual International Conference on Mobile Computing and Networking

October 25, 2019

Los Cabos, Mexico

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Cited By

Wu WZhou DShen LZhao ZLi CHuang G(2025)TransAoA: Transformer-Based Angle of Arrival Estimation for BLE Indoor LocalizationIEEE Transactions on Instrumentation and Measurement10.1109/TIM.2025.352953574(1-12)Online publication date: 2025
https://doi.org/10.1109/TIM.2025.3529535
Morgan A(2025)On the accuracy of BLE indoor localization systemsComputers and Electrical Engineering10.1016/j.compeleceng.2024.109455118:PBOnline publication date: 7-Jan-2025
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1016/j.compeleceng.2024.109455
Furfari FGirolami MMavilia FBarsocchi P(2025)Indoor localization algorithms based on Angle of Arrival with a benchmark comparisonAd Hoc Networks10.1016/j.adhoc.2024.103691166:COnline publication date: 1-Jan-2025
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1016/j.adhoc.2024.103691
Du TSu YSample A(2024)2D+Depth RF Localization via a Low-Cost Receiver2024 IEEE Wireless Communications and Networking Conference (WCNC)10.1109/WCNC57260.2024.10571215(1-6)Online publication date: 21-Apr-2024
https://doi.org/10.1109/WCNC57260.2024.10571215
Wang YFu JWu Z(2024)A Novel Fusion Estimation Method for RSS-AOA-Based Indoor Target TrackingIEEE Sensors Journal10.1109/JSEN.2024.340554624:14(22632-22647)Online publication date: 15-Jul-2024
https://doi.org/10.1109/JSEN.2024.3405546
Lyu ZChan TLeung GLun DPecht M(2024)Counteracting Packet Loss in Fingerprint-Based Indoor Positioning via Spatially Regularized Entropy and Ground-Truth Prior Variational InferenceIEEE Sensors Journal10.1109/JSEN.2024.338107724:9(15651-15664)Online publication date: 1-May-2024
https://doi.org/10.1109/JSEN.2024.3381077
Oh MBijoy Das AKim TLove DBrinton C(2024)Minimum Description Feature Selection for Complexity Reduction in Machine Learning-Based Wireless PositioningIEEE Journal on Selected Areas in Communications10.1109/JSAC.2024.341397742:9(2585-2600)Online publication date: Sep-2024
https://doi.org/10.1109/JSAC.2024.3413977
Girolami MMavilia FFurfari FBarsocchi P(2024)An Experimental Evaluation Based on Direction Finding Specification for Indoor Localization and Proximity DetectionIEEE Journal of Indoor and Seamless Positioning and Navigation10.1109/JISPIN.2023.33452682(36-50)Online publication date: 2024
https://doi.org/10.1109/JISPIN.2023.3345268
Din THuerta JTrilles STorres-Sospedra J(2024)Feasibility Analysis of Self-oriented Antennas for Indoor Positioning based on Direction-of-Arrival and Bluetooth-Low-Energy2024 14th International Conference on Indoor Positioning and Indoor Navigation (IPIN)10.1109/IPIN62893.2024.10786160(1-6)Online publication date: 14-Oct-2024
https://doi.org/10.1109/IPIN62893.2024.10786160
Zheng YDang FYang ZJiang JWang XWang LLiu KChen XLiu Y(2024)BlueKey: Exploiting Bluetooth Low Energy for Enhanced Physical-Layer Key GenerationIEEE INFOCOM 2024 - IEEE Conference on Computer Communications10.1109/INFOCOM52122.2024.10621142(711-720)Online publication date: 20-May-2024
https://doi.org/10.1109/INFOCOM52122.2024.10621142
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