WiBeacon: Expanding BLE Location-based Services via WiFi

Despite the popularity of Bluetooth low energy (BLE) location-based services (LBS) in Internet of things applications, large-scale BLE LBS are extremely challenging due to the expenses of deploying and maintaining BLE beacons. To alleviate this issue, this work presents WiBeacon, which repurposes ubiquitously deployed WiFi access points (AP) into virtual BLE beacons via only moderate software upgrades. Specifically, a WiBeacon-enabled AP can broadcast elaborately designed WiFi packets that could be recognized as iBeacon-compatible location identifiers by unmodified mobile BLE devices. This offers fast deployment of BLE LBS with zero additional hardware costs and low maintenance burdens. WiBeacon is carefully integrated with native WiFi services, retaining transparency to WiFi clients. We implement WiBeacon on commodity WiFi APs (with various chipsets such as Qualcomm, Broadcom, and MediaTek) and extensively evaluate it across various scenarios, including a real commercial application for courier check-ins. During the two-week pilot study, WiBeacon provides reliable services, i.e., as robust as conventional BLE beacons, for 697 users with 150 types of smartphones.