BlueSentinel: a first approach using iBeacon for an energy efficient occupancy detection system

In the last years, the concept of smart buildings has been proposed and proved to be an effective solution to tackle the problem of reducing the power consumption of complex (both residential and commercial) buildings, while providing the users with a very high level of comfort. In this context, knowing the exact position of users inside the buildings has been identified as a needed feature to optimize the behavior of the building itself. Recently, using the occupants mobile devices as sensors has been validated as an effective solution to have accurate occupancy detection systems, even if no energy efficient solution in therm of battery consumption has been found so far. On the contrary, with this work, we present BLUE-SENTINEL, an accurate and power efficient method to identify the occupants of each room of a smart building using mobile devices as source of information. The proposed approach faces the occupancy detection problem with a good accuracy by exploiting iBeacon, a very recent low-power technology proposed by Apple. In particular, since the iBeacon protocol is built upon Bluetooth Low Energy (BLE), it represents a very highly power-efficient solution. In addition to this, the iBeacon technology is characterized by a good level of compatibility and portability, supporting both iOS- and Android-based devices. The proposed approach has been validated in a real environment with a prototype system released as open source showing how this technology is suitable for the occupancy detection in a smart building.