About Beacons Coordinate

Question

I have my project and in my project I'm using beacons. I want to get coordinate with indoor location beacons.Is it possible to coordinate with only 3 beacon ?

Answer 1

If you are asking about using trilateration to find the position of a mobile phone based on the signals coming from three beacons, then this is theoretically possible but not very practical.

The problem is that beacon signals decrease exponentially with distance. Once you get more than 3-5 meters away there is almost as much radio noise as there is signal, meaning you can't really tell how far your are away with any accuracy.

If you place your beacons about 3 meters apart or less, then you can have some success determining position so long as the phone is somewhere in the middle of the triangle. If you try to put your beacons further apart, or if you try to estimate distance to a mobile device significantly outside the triangle, then you will end up using a radio signal that is too weak relative to radio noise. This creates a garbage in garbage out situation with your trilateration algorithm. If you try to calculate position it will simply be incorrect due to the influences of radio noise.

Bottom line: using three beacons will only work for determining the position of devices in a very small area with a radius of about 3 meters.