29th October 2009 – Wireless LAN Vendors focus on Location

Wireless LAN Vendors focus on Location

The leading Wireless LAN vendors have announced location as part of their core WLAN offering over the past year. The following excerpt from an article in today’s Network World details the avaiabliity of Location Engines which can be used by Airetrak Wi-Fi Real Time Location Solution (RTLS) to provide location services to the end user.

“Location is playing an increasing role in Wi-Fi networks. Most recently, Trapeze Networks announced a location-based radio frequency firewall application for its location appliance that works like a fence to prevent Wi-Fi devices in unauthorized areas – such as parking lots – from penetrating the WLAN.

By contrast, real-time location systems (RTLS) locate, to within a few feet, a piece of equipment, object, person or animal that contains a mounted or embedded Wi-Fi tag or connection. Location methods include triangulation, trilateration, RF fingerprinting and time difference of arrival (TDOA). From there, policies can be enforced based on where the device is.

Many of the larger enterprise-class Wi-Fi suppliers now offer location appliances:

• Aruba Airwave Wireless Management Suite with RTLS
• Cisco 3300 Series Mobility Services Engine (MSE) with Context-Aware Mobility Service
• Meru E(z) Location Manager
• Trapeze LA-200 Location Appliance (which has also been supersized to support 200 APs and 4,000 clients)”

Airetrak’s Sales Director, Nick Stone, commented, “This is great news for Airetrak as it opens up the RTLS market across all organisations with wireless LAN. Airetrak’s RTLS solution, ResourceView can integrate with all of these Wi-Fi location platforms, providing the benefits of Wi-Fi based tracking to a much greater number of organisations. Combining the Wi-Fi location engine with small Wi-Fi RFID tags and Airetrak ResourceView provides an effective Wi-Fi tracking RTLS solution for a small investment.”