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craig mathias
Principal

Virtual beacons challenge Wi-Fi for in-building, location-based supremacy

Reviews
Mar 27, 20176 mins
MobileSmall and Medium BusinessWi-Fi

Bluetooth Low Energy (BLE) beacons from Mist Systems and Cisco could revolutionize the consumer experience in retail, healthcare, hospitality.

In-building location and tracking is possible today thanks to the Wi-Fi- and Bluetooth-enabled mobile devices that have become indispensable for organizations and consumers alike. Both wireless technologies can provide great accuracy, and a broad and growing range of security, marketing, and other location-based applications are already at work.

For example, if you’re in a museum standing in front of the dinosaur exhibit, relevant information can be sent to your smartphone. If you’re in a medical complex and need to go from a doctor’s office to the X-ray facility, the technology can provide turn-by-turn in-building directions.

On the retail side, let’s say you’re walking through a mall. The technology lets retailers send location-specific coupons to your smartphone. The same can be done inside a specific retail store. And retailers can gather data on where shoppers are walking within their stores and can analyze that information to improve their marketing and operations.

While Wi-Fi has dominated the in-building location and tracking space for many years, the rise of small and inexpensive beacons based on Bluetooth Low Energy (BLE) technology has introduced an option that many find superior.

Improved spatial resolution is often possible with the deployment of large numbers of beacons. But planning, deploying, maintaining, and managing what can be a very large number of beacons, especially in venues like convention centers, transportation hubs, and stadiums, can be very challenging.

The recent development of virtual beacons is a potential game changer. With virtual beacons, one or more infrastructure devices emulate multiple otherwise discrete beacons, eliminating the need for individual beacon units, and thus reducing deployment and operating expense and with no compromise in functionally.

Startup Mist Systems, founded by ex-Cisco wireless pioneers Sujai Hejela and Bob Friday, and partially funded by Cisco, is leading the development of virtual beacons. Cisco has licensed the new technology and is offering its own virtual BLE beacon product.

Wireless location and tracking: Background and basics

The use of radio waves (RF) to locate and track moving objects goes back to the development of RADAR (radio detection and ranging) during World War II. The deployment of the Global Positioning System (GPS) was a major advance in location and tracking, but satellite-based GPS only works outdoors.

Wi-Fi can provide excellent in-building spatial resolution – on the order of one meter square – and fast time-to-solution, along with active tracking. Solutions are available from both Wi-Fi system vendors and third parties. But a dramatic increase in both interest in and deployment of beacons based on BLE is clearly challenging Wi-Fi.

BLE beacons broadcast a unique ID (UUID) at a given power level and a given transmit duty cycle. Receivers, such as handsets and related mobile devices, then use a separate network, typically Wi-Fi, to query a database with the UUID. Multiple beacons can provide excellent location resolution – down to the one meter square possible with Wi-Fi.

The core challenge with beacons, however, is the low-power nature of BLE. While in theory a given BLE signal can travel the nominal 100-meter range of classic Bluetooth and Wi-Fi, practical implementations of beacons are optimized for physical size, low cost, and long battery life.

Such necessarily results in a more limited range, so the challenge is how to deploy the hundreds to even thousands that might be required to provide coverage in large venues like stadiums, conference centers, and campuses. The logistics and cost of buying, placing, monitoring (for theft and damage, for example), and replacing batteries alone can be enormous. Then there’s the requirement to change the physical location and corresponding database information of a given beacon in an effort to improve performance.

Enter the virtual beacon

Virtual BLE beacons change the picture here more than significantly. A virtual beacon is a radio-based emulation of a physical beacon, with otherwise the same set of capabilities. Virtual beacons can be defined in terms of their virtual physical location (meaning they can be made to appear in a given location, even though all that’s actually present in that location is a radio signal), signal strength, and UUID. The advantages include:

  • Dynamic relocatability – It’s often desirable to physically move a BLE beacon as user traffic patterns change over time. Since the virtual beacon is defined in software, moving a given beacon is literally a drag-and-drop operation.
  • Dynamic reconfiguration – Similarly, operational parameters such as signal strength can be changed with a click. Ditto for adding a new beacon.
  • No batteries to change – Virtual beacons can be built into Wi-Fi access points, or can be provisioned in an access-point-like device that implements just virtual beacons. In either case, power is typically provisioned via Power over Ethernet.
  • No risk of theft – While physical beacons are often subject to theft, stealing an access point is a more involved – and unlikely – situation. Stolen access points regardless are typically rendered useless by management systems.

Virtual beacons were invented by and are now being deployed by Mist Systems, clearly a company with a strong pedigree in wireless (see sidebar, Talking with Mist’s Bob Friday“). Mist’s implementation is cloud-based, using an API enabling client apps to access cloud-resident locationing, tracking, machine learning adaptation, management, proactive and predictive analytics, and other features.

Such capabilities as visit counts, dwell times, and related metrics can be obtained to address a broad range of application requirements and future possibilities. Cisco licensing of Mist’s technologies has already resulted in a virtual beacon product line of their own. Cisco also offers its own CMX Cloud Beacon Center and a “hyperlocation” capability that integrates Wi-Fi and virtual beacons.

And from here?

There is little question that virtual beacons are a true breakthrough in in-building location and tracking. There’s little downside to this approach, and any increased capital cost of a beacon point (such as in excess of that of the sum of individual physical beacons) can usually be amortized via lower operating expense over the life of a given installation.

It’s also conceivable that software-only and even open-source implementations of virtual beacons may appear over time, introducing the possibility of a truly amazing array of innovative and specialized products.

Interestingly, though, virtual beacons do not settle the BLE-vs.-Wi-Fi argument with respect to location applications. The BLE approach still requires a reverse channel for database access, and this is typically and is likely to remain Wi-Fi.

Moreover, a new Wi-Fi positioning standard, 802.11az, is now under development, promising improved accuracy and perhaps even introducing the possibility of a Wi-Fi positioning ecosystem. We’ll cover .11az in more detail in an upcoming article, but, for now, it’s quite clear that BLE-based positioning is seeing increasing growth in popularity, and that the advent of the virtual beacons promises to accelerate what is already more than a trend.

craig mathias
Principal

Craig J. Mathias is a principal with Farpoint Group, an advisory firm specializing in wireless networking and mobile computing. Founded in 1991, Farpoint Group works with technology developers, manufacturers, carriers and operators, enterprises, and the financial community. Craig is an internationally-recognized industry and technology analyst, consultant, conference speaker, author, columnist, and blogger. He regularly writes for Network World, CIO.com, and TechTarget. Craig holds an Sc.B. degree in Computer Science from Brown University, and is a member of the Society of Sigma Xi and the IEEE.

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