Bluetooth beacons are becoming increasingly popular for various applications such as marketing or indoor navigation. However, designing a proper beacon installation requires knowledge of the possible sources of interference in the target environment. While theoretically beacon signal strength should decay linearly with log distance, on-site measurements usually reveal that noise from objects such as Wi-Fi networks operating in the vicinity significantly alters the expected signal range. The paper presents a novel mobile Geographic Information System for measurement, mapping and local as well as online storage of Bluetooth beacon signal strength in semireal time. For the purpose of on-site geovisual analysis of the signal, the application integrates a dedicated interpolation algorithm optimized for low-power devices. The paper discusses the performance and quality of the mapping algorithms in several different test environments.

The article presents the power consumptions measurements performed for three wireless routers operating in IEEE 802.11n standard. A typical consumer-class device Asus RTAC66U was chosen, an operator-class Gateworks Laguna GW2387 and a router built based on the Raspberry Pi3 platform. The aim of experiments was to test the influence of the beacon interframe interval, a client association (joining) in the network and the transmission itself, on the lifetime of battery-powered devices. Theoretical calculations were also performed for the influence of the analyzed scenarios on the battery-powered devices.