I have a requirement to simply know which beacon the user is closest to… thats it…
For example if i have an an that has a button ‘open door’ then when the user presses that button, I will open the door they are closest to, and not any other door.
One potential problem I have is that in my real world environment I am in an office tower, and i could be on any of 6 floors. I don’t want to be detecting that I standing next to a door on a different floor… It might be closest to me in terms of distance, as I might be standing directly above a door that is actually on the floor below, or I might be standing directly below a door on the floor above me, but I am not wanting to open those doors of course… I only want the closest door on the floor I am currently on…
Battery Life is also important as I am to able to put the beacons in an easy to get place, so I would not want to have to be swapping batteries/etc very often.
We recently described the differences between “proximity” and “location” approaches to beacon apps in a blog post—it should help you tell whether Proximity or Location beacons are better for you (:
But long story short, it looks like proximity information is enough for you (“I’m near the door”), so Proximity Beacons should be fine. You can tune their range down to avoid detecting signal from beacons on another floor.
However, Location Beacons can do everything Proximity Beacons can do and more, and they also feature much longer battery life (7 years compared to 2 years, on default settings), so you might want to consider going for the Location Beacons anyway if long battery life is important.