A lot has changed in the location tracking space in the past twenty years.
It is 2019 now turning to 2020 and the technology landscape is now following industry standards.
Standards will drive down costs.
Just look at how Wi-Fi emerged from 802.11 DS and FH prior to 1999, then with the release of 802.11b in 1999, finally with the Wi-Fi Alliance being formed in 2000.
The rest is history.
What has changed?
BLE is now a part of the overall WLAN enterprise. BLE is now being built into the WLAN AP. As a result, location based data now can be provided on a real time basis to a cloud based business model.
Smartphones that incorporate BLE and with BLE based tags now can leverage the existing WLAN infrastructure as the backhaul. This will improve the ROI. Look to BLE 5.1 being part of every smart phone going forward.
Bluetooth 5.1
Advances have been made to provide very precise location accuracy.
Bluetooth direction finding is the major feature of the Bluetooth 5.1 Core Specification. It is designed to enhance location services where previously only signal strength based technology has been used with Received Signal Strength Indication (RSSI).
Bluetooth direction finding will offer new and improved use cases for Real Time Location Systems (RTLS) for asset tracking in a wide range of scenarios from logistics and warehousing to value asset security in healthcare. It also brings added user experiences in proximity-based scenarios for enterprise awareness and contextual information for enabling new business process improvements.
Bluetooth direction finding can be used to detect location in either 2D or 3D dependent on the complexity of its implementation.
Angle of Arrival (AoA) and Angle of Departure (AoD)
Bluetooth direction finding is based around the two key concepts of Angle of Arrival (AoA) and Angle of Departure (AoD). This makes use of the angular phase-shifts that occur between antennas as they receive (AoA) or transmit (AoD) RF signals.
With the use of antenna arrays at either side of the communication link phase shift data can be determined and from this, location can be calculated.
Which approach to choose?
Whether AoA or AoD is chosen for use depends much on the use case, both can be used effectively, but in certain circumstances one or the other will be more suitable given a range of considerations
AoA allows for use of very simple, low cost tags to act as the source device of which can be used to determine the location of the asset. This system would have more complex locator units mounted in an unobstructed manner in location to determine and calculate the position of items that are tagged.
Such scenarios might include:
• Asset tracking in warehouses
• Value asset tracking in hospitals; government, establishments etc.
• Identification of the location of people and staff
AoD requires more complex tags than AoA from a hardware and software perspective. In this scenario the locator device can be simpler in terms of hardware design but does have software complexity for the determination and calculation of the direction finding functionality.
AoD based direction finding has some strong use cases that include smartphones and wearables. At this time smartphones do not support Bluetooth 5.1 but it is expected they will at some point.
Such scenarios might include:
• Wayfinding in large spaces such as airports, hospitals etc.
• Point of interest assistance in shopping malls, exhibitions etc.
• Search and finding of items such as keys, remote controls etc.
Using 4G (Silicon on the Chip), SOC, drives down costs at the edge level.
When the WLAN may not be present, low cost 4G tags can provide location accuracy in and outside of any building environment that will provide this location data to the cloud.
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The bottom line is that the technology advances in BLE, 4G, and now pending 5G will drive down cost in a major way to provide location based accuracy information to the enterprise client. This will enable new business process and improvements that will impact the bottom line.
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