Bluetooth Low Energy (BLE) Received Signal Strength Indicator (RSSI) Data for Proximity Detection in COVID-19 Electronic Contact Tracing

NIST carried out a comprehensive BLE RSI data collection campaign under various operational scenarios. In some scenarios, the transmitting and receiving BLE radios were in line-of-sight (LOS) or each other and in others they were in non-line-of-sight (NLOS). The distance between the radios were measured and recorded in each scenario. in NLOS scenarios, data was collected were walls made of different construction materials were blocking the direct path from the transmitter to the receiver. In LOS scenarios, we looked at the effect of a person being between the radios and how that affected the received signal. It is valuable to make this data, which is well-documented, available to the R&D community so that they can develop and evaluate their own proximity detection algorithms.