An Open Experimental Platform for Ranging, Proximity and Contact Event Tracking using Ultra-Wide-Band and Bluetooth Low-Energy

Abstract

The need for cheaper and more precise localisation techniques has recently amplified. The initial approach has been to roll out high-level software running on smartphones and leveraging Bluetooth proximity sensing. However this approach lacks both precision in terms of ranging, and flexibility in terms of experimental framework to fully explore alternative schemes for contact event tracing. In this context, we thus provide open-access nodes in an open-access experimental platform for ranging and proximity tracking, letting researchers tinker freely with the full software stack on a swarm of multi-radio, low-power devices based on cheap microcontrollers. We provide a tutorial on how to use the platform and open source code building blocks to to program the devices, bare-metal. We then report on initial measurements we have performed using the platform. Perspectives with our platform include applicability studies and comparative evaluation for a large variety of localisation schemes combining the use of Ultra-Wide Band and Bluetooth Low-Energy for better precision and smaller energy budgets – and the use of complementary mechanism guaranteeing privacy protection, able to run directly on-board cheap IoT microcontrollers.