A Proximity Information Propagation Mechanism Using Bluetooth Beacons for Grouping Devices 
Masato Watanabe, Yuya Sakaguchi, Tadachika Ozono, Toramatsu Shintani
Journal of Intelligent Computing, Vol. 8, No. 1, 2017.
DOI: 
Link: http://www.dline.info/jic/fulltext/v8n1/jicv8n1_1.pdf
Abstract:
In educational or business environments, we often have a paperless meeting by using tablet devices. The meeting participants need to log into a meeting server of the meeting by using a token, a keyword  to log into a meeting, defined for each meeting. Nevertheless, the meeting can be immediately held if the tablets ready for use by reducing the costs of logging in of each participant. To reduce the costs, we proposed a new grouping method of tablet devices. The grouping method uses proximity information from a Bluetooth beacon to recognize grouped devices that are near each other. Moreover, the method can solve 
a problem that each device can be an obstacle attenuating signals for grouping. By using the method, working efficiency with tablet devices can be improved because the attendees do not need to operate each device individually to group them. Therefore, the devices can be grouped just by gathering them in a specific nearby location. We observed experimentally that the mechanism can resolve problems of reduced the attenuation 
of Bluetooth signals received by all immediate beacon receivers.