Microservices for Asset Tracking Based on Indoor Positioning System

Abstract

Indoor positioning systems (IPS) are widely used for different use cases, but most of them are for asset tracking and indoor navigation. Asset tracking, for instance, might help industries be more efficient, such as warehouses, stock recording, guest trackers, and many more. Implementation of asset tracking needs to have the IPS, such as trilateration and fingerprinting. To have an accurate location, it is not just precise; the data that will be consumed also needs robust services to process all that data in almost real time. Bluetooth low energy (BLE) is used to send the received signal strength indicator (RSSI) to the microservices-based server. To support this, microservices architecture (MSA) is designed with a Service-Oriented Modeling and Architecture (SOMA) framework to translate business goals into necessary services. We were implementing and comparing both MSA implementation strategies, which are orchestration and choreography strategies, on cloud computing with the Kubernetes platform. These strategies were compared to find the most resource-efficient with the biggest number of served requests. The bigger the served request number, the more assets will be tracked in real time. Less resource usage could also mean the computational cost is inexpensive. The study finds that the choreography strategy in MSA is better for IPS since the number of served requests is five times higher with similar resource usage.