Flexible Technologies for Smart Campus

Flexible Technologies for Smart Campus
Dirk Van Merode 1
, Galyna Tabunshchyk 2
, Kostiantyn Patrakhalko3
, Goncharov Yuriy3
1
Msc, Research Engineer EmSys, Thomas More Mechelen-Antwerpen, Belgium, dirk.vanmerode@thomasmore.be
2
PhD, Assoc. Prof., Zaporizhzhya National Technical University, Ukraine, galina.tabunshchik@gmail.com
Master Students of Zaporizhzhya National Technical University, Ukraine
Abstract The article considers an example of the
advertisement network based on the BLE 4.0, and its facilities for
creating the infrastructure for a Smart Campus, where dynamic
information is provided for the target audience. The authors
provide an analysis of the characteristics and experimental
implementation of this system. Moreover, the practical usage of a
popular vendor and the needed back-end to provide dynamic
usages of the network, both in appearance and content is
described. In the paper different wireless technologies are
compared in regards to their main feature and field of
application. In general the characteristics of a Blue Tooth Low
Energy, BLE, are highlighted. This is elaborated upon in the
Smart Campus example. The Smart Campus is an indoor
wireless network to deliver location and user based dynamic
information to the different visitors, teacher or students of a
university campus, both for day-to-day use as for specific events.
To keep the system interesting and to augment ease-of-use for all
kind of users and content providers, a dedicated content
management system is developed within the Smart Campus case.
The complete system consists of a set of beacons, an application
on a smartphone, a database with the related CMS. All is
developed in an international cooperation between different
universities.
Keywords — iBeacon, BLE, Mobile Application, Android, CMS
I. INTRODUCTION
Bluetooth Low Energy (BLE) is the new specification of
Bluetooth available for all new smartphones. Bluetooth beacon
is a small low-cost, low-power system perfectly closes the gap
between GPS & NFC (fig.1) and can ne used for indoor
navigation.
Figure 1. Jaalee Beacons
The different fields of application are ample. In general a
beacon registration activates the mobile device, and based on
UUID an identification of the necessary information at the
external device begins [7].
Most of the developed applications which use beacons are
in advertisement and the retail sector. Users can be informed of
an interesting discount when passing the store or even when
The aim of this paper to suggest a solution for university
wireless infrastructure development based on ibeacon.
II. OBSERVATION OF WIRELESS TECHNOLOGIES
There are numerous specifications which are commonly
used for indoor navigation. The most popular indoor wireless
technologies are:
-Fi: is a local area network (LAN) technology that
allows communication between electronic devices over a
wireless signal. The IEEE 802.11 standard defines Wi-Fi
technology.
network (PAN) defined in the new specification of Bluetooth
technology. It is the low-cost and low-power solution of
Bluetooth aimed at fitness, healthcare, security and home
entertainment industries.
protocols based on an IEEE 802.15 standard, used to create
personal area networks (PAN) built from small, low-power
digital radios. Its network topology is mesh and permits the
transmission of data through nodes of a network, reaching long
distances but with a small data rate. ZigBee is a lowcost
technology.
enables short range wireless communication between fixed and
mobile devices and builds wireless personal areas (PAN).
Each of them already has great range on commercial
applications [2]. And there are numerous of works devoted to
comparison of these technologies [3], and all of them recognize
that the best compromise in price, distance and speed is
provided by BLE.
III. BLE4 CHARACTERISTICTS
Bluetooth® technology is supported by many different
development platforms [4].
One of the advantages of iBeacons technology is that both
Apple (with iOS and OS X) and Google (with Android) have
committed to support for Bluetooth Low Energy standard
(BLE) [5]:
running at
least iOS 7 are supported: iPhone 4S or later, iPad 3 or later,
any iPad mini, iPod touch 5th generation or later.
Macs (equipped with at least OS X 10.9 Mavericks): mid-
2011 MacBook Air, Mac mini, mid-2012 MacBook Pros.
978-1-4673-8246-5/16/$31.00 ©2016 IEEE 24-26 February 2016, UNED, Madrid, Spain
2016 13th International Conference on Remote Engineering and Virtual Instrumentation (REV)
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Earlier Macs can add Bluetooth 4.0 support through a third
party USB dongle.
iBeacons is 4.3 (Jelly Bean). Many Android devices already
support Bluetooth Low Energy: Samsung Galaxy S3, Samsung
Galaxy Note II, HTC One, Nexus 7 2013, edition, Nexus 4,
HTC Butterfly, Droid DNA, etc.
BLE devices can be in different operating states and roles
depending on its function.
Therefore, the possible states are the following [7]:
channels
er
o Master Role: Communicates with device in the Slave
role.
o Slave Role: Communicates with single device in Master
Role.
The network topology of BLE is the star type. Master
devices can have multiple link layer connections to peripherals
(slaves) and simultaneously scan for another devices. On the
other hand, a slave can have only one link layer connection to
one Master.
Moreover, a peripheral can send advertising events without
expecting a connection; it is used to show data to the scanners
without the need to maintain a long time connection.
BLE communication consists of two main
parts: advertising and connecting.
Advertising is a one-way discovery mechanism. Devices
which want to be discovered can transmit packets of data in
intervals from 20 ms to 10 seconds. The shorter the interval,
the shorter the battery life, but the faster the device can be
discovered. The packets can be up to 47 bytes in length and
consist of (fig.2):
1 byte preamble
4 byte access address
2-39 bytes advertising channel PDU
3 bytes CRC
Figure 2. Beacon identification
For application development there are a lot of different
solutions as mostly all manufactures of the ibeacons provide
SDK for it [5].
More common solutions are for Core Location
Development for IOS 7/8 [5],[7] and AltBeacon - an Android
library providing APIs to interact with beacons [8].
There are, however some important technical challenges to
tackle before getting the most out of all features and
commercial options. To be ahead of things and for the
technology to mature, the scientific community needs to
address the following issues: triangulation for an exact position
determination, preciseness of position, preciseness of signal
strength, static interference with indoor-usage due to walls,
dynamic interference due to people, interference due to
multiple beacons in one location. Multiple beacon-app users in
one location
IV. SMART CAMPUS EXAMPLE
The idea of a Smart Campus for universities is that the
campus talks to you. Individual information for students,
teachers and visitors is delivered, depending on their profile
and time of day.
Smart Campus Application consists from three main parts:
Mobile application for different operational systems iOS,
Android; CMS for updating advertisement information,
administration system, which consists from different
components aimed to adjust hardware characteristics.
Smart Campus Mobile Application provides users a variety
of functionality, allowing working both in on-line mode as in
off-line mode detecting buzz from the beacons (fig. 3-4).
Figure 3. Mobile application interface for Android
As there no common decision in the beacon manufacture
the Altbeacon library was chosen for the application
development [9]. Local data of earlier met beacons are stored at
the database developed with SQLite [10].
l
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Figure 4. Off-line panel
Figure 5. Deployment diagram of the Mobile application
One of the advantages of application is possibility to
register through Facebook account (fig.6 ).
Figure 6. Registration form
For managing local information putting beacon to the
uses
the local database. One of the task is to control the time of last
synchronization with central database (fig. 7).
For managing the beacon information there are developed
the content management system Beacon-CMS. It provides
wide range of functionality:
- the control of user access based on roles (RBAC);
- administration user information;
- managing beacons groups;
- managing advertisement information for each beacon or a
group;
- multilanguage support;
- interactive map.
Figure 7. Application Settings
The architecture of Beacon-CMS are based on pattern
Model-View-Controller (MVC). There are developed 3 main
controllers :
- beacon controller is responsible for all operations with
beacons, with views - beacon-list with beacon lists,
beacon-create for adding new beacon, beacon-update
interface for beacon information updating, beacon-
map displaying beacon map;
- GroupController controller responsible for all
operations with users groups and connected to all
necessary views
- UserController controller which is responsible for
separate user data.
CMS provides services for mobile applications for
uploading upgraded advertisement information (fig. 8).
Figure 8. Mobile App and Server Communication
In the system there is implemented hierarchical relationship
between user roles. Based on these roles decision is making
regarding user access to one or other system functions. Parent
role include all functionality allowed to the one lower in
hierarchy (fig.9).
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Lets consider some other Beacon-CMS functions and user
interface more detail:
A) It provides the administrator interface and provides all
the necessary capabilities to manage users database, namely:
1) view a list of all users with basic parameters;
2) search for a user by different criteria;
3) sort user list;
4) change the user-specifications;
5) the ability to anchor the user to different beacon groups;
6) the ability to remove a user;
7) the ability to see all available beacons anchored for a
user (fig.10);
Figure 10. List of appointed beacons
B) It provides the interface and provide all the necessary
capabilities for managing groups;
C) It provides clear user interface and provide all the
necessary features for managing beacons, namely:
1) view a list of all beacons with all specification;
2) search for a beacon on a number of criteria;
3) beacons sort the list by a number of parameters;
4) the ability to change the Beacon specification;
5) ability to remove beacon;
D) Beacon-CMS provides multilingual support in the
system is implemented a flexible and convenient tool for
internationalization, which provides the following functions on
multilingualism:
1) choice of language translation;
2) to see a complete list of available function words for the
selected language;
3) sort the list of official word on a number of parameters;
4) download the file in the .xls format to establish the
translation;
6) the user should be able to install any language from the
list of languages for themselves;
E) System support an interactive map with location beacons
marked on it (fig11) - the system should enable the placement
of interactive labels - beacons map / site plan that can have an
idea of the geographical location beacons, as well as double
clicks on such a mark the user must go to view / edit content
this beacon (fig. 12, 13 ).
Figure 11. Beacon location
Only the administrator can add remove, delete, mark the
pin of the beacon at the map. For User Map is available only in
view mode.
Figure 12. Managing beacon information
Application also allows to collect statistics on most used
beacons, time of usage, number of users which detect beacon,
users hardware which is received from mobile application
Figure 9. User Hierarchy
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Figure 13. Beacon information administration
Multilanguage adjustment of the user interface (fig. 14)
makes Beacon-CMS more flexible as can be easily adjusted to
any language.
Figure 14. Multilanguage adjustment
It is possible as to correct translation manually inside
Beacon-CMS as upload translation from xml file (fig. 15).
Figure 15. Uploading interface translation
Smart Campus Application is passing open-testing period at
Thomas More Mechelen-Antwepen University College
(Belgium) [11]. For experiments there were selected Jaalee
Beacon developed by Chengdu Jaalee Technology Co [12]. For
beacon features adjustment [13] there were developed
additional administrative applications for IOS and Android.
V. CONCLUSIONS
The authors developed a Hardware and Software solution
of a Smart Campus for universities, where individual
information for students, teachers and visitors can be delivered,
depending on their profile and time of day. This can be
interesting to demonstrate at open days, to prove that
technologic campuses are ahead with modern-day technology.
This way high-school graduates, their parents and other visitors
can do a guided tour, without an actual guide. So all
highlighted places at the campus can talk and demonstrate
themselves, and people use their own smartphone as for
additional information.
Considered in the article design is very flexible and can be
easily adopted for other systems with the similar tasks for
example Smart City, Smart Warehouse, Smart People.
This work is a result of common efforts of EMSys Group of
Thomas-More Mechelen-Antwerpen and Software Tools
Department of Zaporizhzhya National Technical University
within the framework of the European Tempus- project
544091-TEMPUS-1-2013-1-BE-TEMPUS-JPCR
s with
implementation of Innovative Virtual approaches for
integration of Research, Education and Production in UA, GE,
[14].
REFERENCES
[1] Th. D. Ndie, Cl. Tangha, T. Sangbong, A. F Kufor
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systems.com/
[3] .
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[4] Bluetooth Smart Technology: Powering the Internet of Things. [Online].
Available: http://www.bluetooth.com/Pages/Bluetooth-Smart.aspx -
[5] Indoor-SDK [Online] http://estimote.com/indoor/
[6] 2014. 15p [Online]. Available:
http://meetingofideas.files.wordpress.com/2013/12/ibeacons-bible-1-
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[7] Core Location Framework Reference.
https://developer.apple.com/library/ios/documentation/CoreLocation/Re
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[8] Guide to iBeacon Hardware. [Online] Available: http://beekn.net/guide-
to-ibeacons/
[9] Android Beacon Library [Online] Available
http://altbeacon.github.io/android-beacon-library/battery_manager.html
[10] Categorical Index Of SQLite Documents [Online] Available:
https://www.sqlite.org/docs.html
[11] http://www.thomasmore.be
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[13] M aptive Distance Estimation Based on RSSI in
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[14] Desire project Website. Available: http://www.tempus-desire.eu/
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