A Fast Item Identification and Counting in Ultra-dense Beacon Networks

While many technologies (e.g., RFID, QR code, etc.) have been developed for items identification, they fail to provide continuous monitoring for items in transit. This paper introduces a Bluetooth Low Energy (BLE) beacon-based system, which can be deployed easily with any off-the-shelf smartphone without modification on the existing infrastructures. However, it is an elusive challenge to achieve a fast item identification and counting involving massive items stacked up inside a confined space (e.g., a container), resulting in an ultra-dense beacon network (UDBN). To this end, we propose a novel beaconing solution capable of informing the receiver about their own presence as well as the presence of their neighboring beacons for identification purpose. Specifically, our proposed solution provides a well-designed yet innovative protocol data unit (PDU) which allows the beacon to encapsulate its neighboring information into its own advertising packet. A prototype consisting of 300 beacons is implemented to demonstrate the feasibility of our proposed solution for real-world applications. The extensive experiment confirm the superiority of our proposed solution in delivering a fast item identification and counting in UDBN.