Performance Evaluation of an ESPresense/MQTT Architecture for Real-Time Locating System

• Emanuel de Franceschi Vieira UFSM
• Tiago Antônio Rizzetti UFSM

DOI: https://doi.org/10.5753/errc.2025.17688

Resumo

This work evaluates the performance of a Real-Time Location System (RTLS) based on low-cost and open-source technologies. The system uses ESP32 devices running the ESPresense firmware to detect Bluetooth Low Energy (BLE) advertisements and publish data through the MQTT protocol. The performance tests were conducted on a single locator device that is part of an existing system deployed in a real environment, where multiple locators are distributed across different rooms. The results indicated an average latency of approximately 85 ms under low traffic and around 44 ms under continuous traffic, both with 0% message loss and stable response times. Furthermore, the throughput increased almost linearly with the number of active beacons, showing that the ESP32 did not become a processing bottleneck within the evaluated limits. These findings demonstrate that the ESPresense/MQTT architecture provides adequate performance, robustness, and scalability for medium-sized RTLS deployments at low cost.

Referências

Al-Maktary, O., Susanto, M., and Mardiana, M. (2025). Evaluation of rssi-based distance estimation with esp32 ble modules for indoor asset tracking. ELKHA : Jurnal Teknik Elektro, 17:172–179.

Fernández-Conde, J. (2023). A low-cost hardware/software platform for lossless real-time data acquisition from imaging spectrometers. MDPI: Sensors, 23(9).

Liubimov, O. and Liubimov, M. (2023). Use of open-source cots/mots hardware and software platforms for the build up of the cubesat nanosatellites. Journal of Rocket-Space Technology, 31(4):138–147.

Misal, S. R., Prajwal, S. R., Niveditha, H. M., Vinayaka, H. M., and Veena, S. (2020). Indoor positioning system (ips) using esp32, mqtt and bluetooth. In 2020 Fourth International Conference on Computing Methodologies and Communication (ICCMC), pages 79–82.

Thiede, S., Sullivan, B., Damgrave, R., and Lutters, E. (2021). Real-time locating systems (rtls) in future factories: technology review, morphology and application potentials. Procedia CIRP, 104:671–676. 54th CIRP CMS 2021 - Towards Digitalized Manufacturing 4.0.