TY - JOUR
T1 - From Conception to Retirement
T2 - A Lifetime Story of a 3-Year-Old Wireless Beacon System in the Wild
AU - Ding, Yi
AU - Liu, Ling
AU - Yang, Yu
AU - Liu, Yunhuai
AU - Zhang, Desheng
AU - He, Tian
N1 - Funding Information:
The work of Yunhuai Liu was supported by the National Key Research and Development Program of China under Grant 2018YFB2100300 and Grant 2018YFB0803400 and in part by the National Natural Science Foundation of China (NSFC) under Grant 61925202 and Grant 61772046.
Publisher Copyright:
© 1993-2012 IEEE.
PY - 2022/2/1
Y1 - 2022/2/1
N2 - We report a 3-year city-wide study of an operational indoor sensing system based on Bluetooth Low Energy (BLE) called aBeacon (short for alibaba Beacon). aBeacon is pilot-studied, A/B tested, deployed, and operated in Shanghai, China to infer the indoor status of Alibaba couriers, e.g., arrival and departure at the merchants participating in the Alibaba Local Services platform. In its full operation stage (2018/01-2020/04), aBeacon consists of customized BLE devices at 12,109 merchants, interacting with 109,378 couriers to infer their status to assist the scheduling of 64 million delivery orders for 7.3 million customers with a total amount of $\$ $ 600 million order values. Although in an academic setting, using BLE devices to detect arrival and departure looks straightforward, it is non-trivial to design, build, deploy, and operate aBeacon from its conception to its retirement at city scale in a metric-based approach by considering the tradeoffs between various practical factors (e.g., cost and performance) during long-term system evolution. We report our study in two phases, i.e., an 8-month pilot study and a 28-month deployment and operation in the wild. We focus on an in-depth reporting on the five lessons learned and provide their implications in other systems with long-term operation and broad geospatial coverage, e.g., Edge Computing.
AB - We report a 3-year city-wide study of an operational indoor sensing system based on Bluetooth Low Energy (BLE) called aBeacon (short for alibaba Beacon). aBeacon is pilot-studied, A/B tested, deployed, and operated in Shanghai, China to infer the indoor status of Alibaba couriers, e.g., arrival and departure at the merchants participating in the Alibaba Local Services platform. In its full operation stage (2018/01-2020/04), aBeacon consists of customized BLE devices at 12,109 merchants, interacting with 109,378 couriers to infer their status to assist the scheduling of 64 million delivery orders for 7.3 million customers with a total amount of $\$ $ 600 million order values. Although in an academic setting, using BLE devices to detect arrival and departure looks straightforward, it is non-trivial to design, build, deploy, and operate aBeacon from its conception to its retirement at city scale in a metric-based approach by considering the tradeoffs between various practical factors (e.g., cost and performance) during long-term system evolution. We report our study in two phases, i.e., an 8-month pilot study and a 28-month deployment and operation in the wild. We focus on an in-depth reporting on the five lessons learned and provide their implications in other systems with long-term operation and broad geospatial coverage, e.g., Edge Computing.
KW - Bluetooth
KW - Senor network
KW - beacon
KW - instant delivery
KW - mobile computing
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U2 - 10.1109/TNET.2021.3107043
DO - 10.1109/TNET.2021.3107043
M3 - Article
AN - SCOPUS:85125245345
SN - 1063-6692
VL - 30
SP - 47
EP - 61
JO - IEEE/ACM Transactions on Networking
JF - IEEE/ACM Transactions on Networking
IS - 1
ER -