Make mobility work – with wireless infrastructure and location services

By Ekahau, Inc.

Today, when hospitals and manufacturing plants need to improve their productivity or increase the safety of their employees, they often choose a new technology called Real-time Location System (RTLS). What is this RTLS, and why is it becoming such a hot topic with the CIOs? By Antti Korhonen, CEO and President of Ekahau, Inc.

Wireless data and voice are an absolute requirement for improving productivity and reducing costs in today’s business environment. Standard wireless Wi-Fi networks enable high bandwidth data, voice, and video services within the enterprise. But the need goes deeper than that.

Businesses seek ways to use their wireless infrastructure also to track the location of critical assets, personnel, and inventory. Adding location-aware applications as an overlay on to the existing wireless network gives businesses a simple, automated way to ensure that the critical enterprise assets and people are at the right place and at the right time.

In addition, this will improve overall productivity, generate savings, and increase employee safety.

Indoor real-time location, but how?
T o locate and monitor people and assets real-time, indoors and outdoors, in which building, floor, and room they are, is nothing new. Since the early 80s there have been a variety of different technology solutions available for this. The problem however is always the same: the prohibitively high cost of the proprietary infrastructure. GPS, on the other hand, does not work indoors, as the satellite signals are blocked by walls, so that is not an answer, either.

Today, most enterprises have Wi-Fi network for data and often for voice purposes. Therefore, it would make sense that this wireless platform would be used for asset tracking as well. This is exactly the reason why Wi-Fi based asset tracking system, or Wi-Fi RTLS, is becoming so popular.

A typical turn-key Wi-Fi RLTS system includes the following components:

• RF Site Survey software tools – for deployment
• Positioning Engine server software – to calculate the asset location from the RF signals
• Application software – a front-end interface for end users for monitoring location, alerting and reporting, and
• Wi-Fi tags – small battery powered tags that can be attached to any assets or carried by people.

In addition to locating Wi-Fi tags, RTLS systems can also locate devices that have a Wi-Fi radio built inside – like laptops, PDAs, and VoIP phones.

RTLS is producing also short term benefits
Let’s a ssume there would be a cost effective RTLS system, as above, to locate assets and people in real-time, with room level accuracy also indoors. What would be the benefit for the business owner? It seems that over the years this technology has matured to the point that we can find real ROI stories enabled by RTLS. The primary ROI drivers for RTLS today are:

• 1: Better asset utilization through asset visibility. For example, in a hospital campus with RTLS, staff can find medical equipment for clinical use and preventive maintenance much faster than before.
• 2: Improved enterprise processes through better process visibility. It is much easier to improve the workflow and process when you see the process bottlenecks etc.
• 3: Safety and security. Tagging miners underground, nurses in psychiatric care wards and hazardous area workers in heavy manufacturing. In case of an emergency, it is important to know where your staff is.

RTLS is not passive RFID
The main difference between RTLS and passive RFID tags is that passive RFID is used mostly for ID purposes and periodically read by portals and scanners as assets pass by. RTLS tags are used for real-time location and they can report the location continuously, as long as they are within the wireless network coverage area. Wi-Fi RTLS tags can also support two-way communications, such as receiving text messages. They have a battery that lasts typically 4-5 years depending on the usage case.

Typically, Wi-Fi tags only transmit approximately 60 bytes of information per each location scan, and most of the tags are in a sleep mode until triggered by motion sensors to track location. So, losing bandwidth is not a concern in the Wi-Fi RTLS deployments, even if 1000s of tags are used at the same time.

Newest enterprise gadget is a locatable Wi-Fi pager!
Two-way paging in enterprise environment has always been one of the must-have wireless applications. Traditional paging market was disrupted early in this decade with the cell phone SMS message services, which caused many paging system vendors to close their business. Still today, many organizations use proprietary wireless pagers, because they provide a reliable, real-time method to send messages to employees, and receive acknowledgements from them. The problem with the traditional paging systems, however, is the cost of the proprietary infrastructure they need.

An obvious solution to the problem, again, is to utilize the existing wireless infrastructure, Wi-Fi, also for paging purposes. Today there are vendors, such as Ekahau, who manufacture small credit card size wireless personnel badges, which function as locatable Wi-Fi pagers. A Wi-Fi pager has a small LCD display, control buttons for receiving and sending messages, and a rechargeable battery that can keep the pager functional at least one week at the time.

In addition to traditional two-way paging, real-time location and messaging combined, enable services that have not been available before. Location-based information and alerts enabled by Wi-Fi pagers are already being put in use in several organizations worldwide.

Best of breed RTLS is open, easy and accurate.
If we define a best of breed RTLS solution, it should, first of all, be Open, meaning that it should work over any brand of Wi-Fi network infrastructure, as long as the network is 802.11 compliant. If the RTLS system is developed to work with one Wi-Fi network vendor only, it may not be future proof, as it does not fully comply with the standard. Secondly, the RTLS system should be Easy to install and maintain. The easiest RTLS solutions do not require any cabling, but instead consist of simply software and wireless tags. Such a system is truly fast and easy to install. And lastly, the system should be Accurate, meaning that the system is capable of delivering room-level accuracy over any existing enterprise grade Wi-Fi network, with no additional infrastructure needed. In an ideal case, the best of breed RTLS should be just software and tags, using the existing standard.

Ekahau is the Wi-Fi RTLS pioneer
Ekahau is one of the leading vendors in the Wi-Fi based location tracking market. Company was founded as a spin-off from Helsinki University in Finland, in 2000, and has today its headquarters in Saratoga, CA with sales offices in Reston, VA and throughout Europe. There are currently more than 100 resellers worldwide – including Siemens, Nortel, McKesson, Fluke and others – distributing Ekahau products and solutions.

Ekahau’s technology and location algorithms, which are protected with over 10 patents, were first invented by the university scientist team called Complex System Computation Group (COSCO). Former COSCO team members include for example Linus Torvalds, the inventor of Linux. Location algorithms are very important because they avoid the inherent problems with traditional triangulation methods. They give Ekahau’s RTLS solution unrivaled accuracy and enable the delivery of an all-software solution that can be deployed on top of any existing Wi-Fi infrastructure.

The primary reason customers choose Ekahau is that Ekahau RTLS runs over any standard Wi-Fi network, and is one of the most cost effective solution for accurate asset tracking within enterprise campus.