Location-based services

What are location-based services?

Digital modernization is accelerating, driving the creation and expansion of location-aware services like turn-by-turn wayfinding, high-value asset tracking, retail customer engagement, business analytics, and smart office initiatives. Yet organizations are unable to deploy indoor location as widely as they would like or to provide seamless user experiences across indoor and outdoor environments due to the complexity, cost, and level of effort existing solutions require.

Gartner projects the indoor location services market to reach $55 billion revenue by 2030, up from $1.9 billion in 2021 (Gartner, Emerging Technologies: Revenue Opportunity Projection for Indoor Location Services). Much of this growth is driven by the increase in trackable IoT devices. Indoor location services have already been widely adopted for healthcare, retail, hospitality, logistics, industrial, and manufacturing application.

Outdoor location is able to use GPS measurements because they have clear line of sight. Indoor location cannot rely on GPS. For example, when you use Google Maps on your mobile phone outdoors, it can calculate your location to an accuracy of several meters. However, when you use Google or Apple Maps indoors, the error of measurement is much larger.

For the past 20 years, the industry has been looking at new methods to provide accurate indoor measurements. Wi‑Fi location-based measurements can use fine time measurement (FTM) techniques based on the 802.11mc standard (also known as Wi‑Fi CERTIFIED Location) to calculate the round-trip time. The APs must know their precise location so that they can act as reference points for client devices.

Low Power Indoor (LPI) devices are already approved for use in the 6 GHz band for Wi‑Fi 6E and in the future Wi‑Fi 7 but for higher frequencies, regulators require that incumbent users of the spectrum are protected. Automate Frequency Coordination services, such as Federated Wireless’s, rely on location determination to protect incumbents and unlock the additional 1200 MHz of spectrum in countries that follow the US FCC model (500 MHz in many European countries). This additional capacity in the 6 GHz band delivers greater speed, supports higher densities, and unlocks new use cases such as high-definition video and virtual reality.

802.11mc is an IEEE definition for Wi‑Fi which includes a ranging technology known as FTM. Unlike previous ranging technologies that were based on signal strength (RSSI), FTM uses round trip time to deliver higher levels of accuracy. Signal strength provides ~10-meter accuracy compared to 1–2-meter accuracy for FTM, dependent on the accuracy of the AP reference point placement. The Wi‑Fi Alliance has created a vendor certification known as Wi‑Fi CERTIFIED Location® for solutions that demonstrate 802.11mc functionality. HPE Aruba Networking is the only enterprise AP vendor to achieve Wi‑Fi Location certification.

Open Locate is an industry-wide initiative to standardize how APs share their reference locations with the ecosystem, over-the-air and via cloud-based APIs. This enables mobile devices to locate themselves and to support location and analytics applications such as workplace utilization, space analytics, geofencing, and wayfinding services. Devices that lack support for FTM can also participate; they can calculate ranges using the nearest AP using signal strength ranging via Wi‑Fi or Bluetooth radios that are built into the APs. HPE Aruba Networking is working in conjunction with IEEE and the Wi-Fi Alliance and ecosystem vendors such as Google, Samsung, Zebra, and Tile to formalize Open Locate.

Wi‑Fi location-based services accelerate the deployment of wayfinding, asset tracking, proximity marketing, and other services―without costly overlays. HPE Aruba Networking’s Wi‑Fi indoor location-based services deliver:

• Greater IT efficiency: Leverages existing Wi‑Fi footprint and HPE Aruba Networking's self-locating APs to automatically place access points on maps, thereby saving weeks or even months of IT effort.
• Automatic updates: HPE Aruba Networking’s APs update their location after add/moves/changes so they can act as highly accurate reference points for client measurements.
• Ease of integration with standard mapping apps: Uses the universal reference framework of latitude and longitude, which is easily consumed by Google, Apple, and Bing Maps.
• High-precision client location: Precise location data is beaconed over Wi‑Fi or BLE frames to client devices using Open Locate and FTM.

HPE Aruba Networking access points support FTM and have achieved Wi‑Fi Alliance certification.

• 650 Series Campus: Wi‑Fi 6E
• 630 Series Campus: Wi‑Fi 6E
• 610 Series Campus: Wi‑Fi 6E
• 580 Series Outdoor: Wi‑Fi 6
• 550 Series Campus: Wi‑Fi 6
• 530 Series Campus: Wi‑Fi 6
• 510 Series Campus: Wi‑Fi 6
• 500 Series Campus: Wi‑Fi 6
• 500H Series Remote: Wi‑Fi 6