With so many uses of beacons centred around notifications to users, it’s interesting to see Queen Mary University of London doing something different. Research by Kleomenis Katevas, Laurissa Tokarchuk, Hamed Haddadi and Richard G. Clegg of the Department of Computing of Imperial College looks into detecting group (crowd) formations using iBeacon (pdf).
They used beacon RSSI and phone motion together with algorithms based on graph theory to predict interactions inside the crowd. They verified their finding using using video footage as ground truth.
The paper has some particularly interesting observations from testing RSSI in an EMC screened anechoic chamber and also has some information on distance estimation models.