Driving Business Value in Location Based Services via the new Bluetooth Direction Finding: An overview of AoA and AoD technologies

In 2019, the Bluetooth Special Interest Group (Bluetooth SIG)ーthe trade association that oversees the development of Bluetooth® standards and the licensing of the Bluetooth technologies and trademarksーannounced a new direction finding feature as part of version 5.1 of the Bluetooth Core Specification. By including this new feature, the RSSI-based proximity location enabled by Bluetooth via “beacons” is taken to the next level by opening up for enabling angular estimation over Bluetooth technology.

The AoA (Angle-of-Arrival) and AoD (Angle-of-Departure) methods allow for measuring the angular directions of BLE (Bluetooth Low Energy) radio signals, and therefore compute the location with an accuracy down to 10 cm and latency down to a fraction of a second. While the AoA perfectly fits with an network-centric system architecture which is optimal for asset-tracking, the AoD is a revolutionary methodology that is optimal for addressing mobile- and consumer-centric use-cases.

In this presentation we will introduce and describe the key features of these new AoA and AoD methods, in particular focusing on how they could be exploited in the context of smart building, domotics, access control, well-being, wayfinding, and several other Location Based Services (LBS). Real-world examples of existing implementations will be showcased and discussed.