GPS-Enabled Automatic Access Point Placement

The Challenge of Indoor Navigation

Unlike outdoor environments, where GPS technology excels in providing precise location data, indoor spaces pose significant challenges. Traditional GPS signals struggle to penetrate buildings, leading to inaccuracies and poor performance. This has long been a hurdle for implementing efficient wireless networks in large, multi-level indoor spaces. The need for strategic placement of wireless access points (APs) to ensure optimal coverage and connectivity adds another layer of complexity. Achieving even 3 meters of location accuracy indoors has been accomplished with various methods of calibrating the wireless infrastructure or adding in Bluetooth beacons or Ultra Wide Band technology.

Once upon a time, you had to do pirouettes with your laptop in hopes of creating a calibration fingerprint for the wireless environment if you were attempting to get a semblance of location accuracy. See examples: LINK

Demand for indoor navigation has existed but has not always been feasible. Attempts at achieving indoor location awareness have been in place since the early 2000’s. From sprawling malls, hotels, to complex hospital layouts, the ability to accurately pinpoint locations and ensure robust wireless coverage indoors has been achieved in the past with a multitude of overlay networks. Things are finally changing. The latest innovation in this arena is GPS-enabled automatic access point placement, a cutting-edge development spearheaded by leading wireless hardware vendors. I heard about this in great detail at Mobility Field Day 11!

 

Recent advancements have enabled the integration of GPS technology with indoor positioning systems (IPS). Now GPS-enabled access points can auto place themselves on building floor plans. The management system still needs the scale set on the building floor plan and a few known locations to be defined for the GPS-enabled access points to auto-place their neighboring access points on the building floor plan. 

Currently, the Cisco automatic access point placement gives the end user the ability to rotate the access point layout to align with the boundaries of the building layouts within Cisco Catalyst Center. This video from Mobility Field Day 11 features Dave Benham from Cisco Systems explaining how this feature works. 

 

How It Works

1. GPS Integration: The access points have a GPS chip in it which helps each AP (access points) that can “hear” other access points figure out where they are in relation to each other.

2. Barometric Pressure Sensors: Some access point vendors can even place access points on the correct floor level of the building floor plan by utilizing the data detected by the barometric pressure sensor in the access point. Less barometric pressure is equated to being on a higher floor.

3. Accelerometer Sensor: This sensor can detect the angle at which the access point is physically installed. Ceilings inside buildings may not always be horizontal to the floor elevation, and this angle of installation (when known to the wireless infrastructure) will aide in accurate calculations in the wireless infrastructure system's location tracking algorithms.

4. Automatic Placement Algorithms: Leveraging AI (Artificial Intelligence) and machine learning, the system analyzes the digital map and the gathered location data to determine the most likely accurate placement of access points.

5. Deployment and Adjustment: Once the likely locations are identified, the access points are auto-placed on the digital floor plan within the wireless management system.

Leading wireless hardware vendors are integrating GPS-enabled automatic AP placement into their product offerings, providing businesses with advanced tools to enhance their wireless infrastructures’ location awareness.

 

The integration of GPS-enabled automatic access point placement on digital maps is a big deal for indoor navigation and context awareness. No more pirouettes!

As more wireless hardware vendors incorporate support for 802.11mc, further advancements in the accuracy of indoor location will become possible. 

802.11mc (Wi-Fi Round Trip Time) is an IEEE standard that enables devices to measure the distance to nearby Wi-Fi access points. This high-precision synchronization between peers and round-trip time calculation (Wi-Fi RTT (Round Trip Time)) for location estimation typically results in a reported location accuracy within one to two meters. Wi-Fi RTT has the potential to become a mainstream sub-meter-level indoor positioning technology as more vendors and client devices enable support for this functionality.

Outdoor WiFi is Smaller, Sleeker and Faster #HPE #Aruba #MFD3 #AP387

 Once upon a time, I found myself doing a lot of outdoor WiFi. Not the type of outdoor WiFi you hear people talking about now (stadiums or arenas), but college campuses, outdoor mesh and point to point links.

Recently at Mobility Field Day 3, I ran across this sweet little access point by Aruba. They call it the AP-387. I call it tiny, portable and FAST. It's their new flagship 802.11ac/ad outdoor access point.

They've designed it for maximum distances between APs of 300 meters (that's ~980 feet) and that is just about perfect for most outdoor bridge links. Notice, I said most. We all know of at least one or two bridge links that are pushing a mile long or more. This AP-387 has a 60GHz and a 5GHz radio built into this tiny, outdoor rated package and it is capable of multi-gigabit link speeds. Oh, and it can handle 'rain events' that might make a 5GHz link less than useable.

It has the ability to self-acquire a link by using the electronic scanning capabilities of the 60GHz antenna. It uses existing mounting hardware from the AP-270 (AP-270-MNT-H1/H2). If the link becomes disrupted or block, the radio can scan plus or minus 40 degrees horizontal and plus or minus 10 degrees vertical to re-establish the link. It can even re-engage the link through an RF bounce off of a flat smooth surface (should one exist) between the two ends of the link.


The narrow beam-width of the 60GHz radio lends itself to being co-located within 4-5 meters of another AP-387 using the same 60GHz channel. The AP will power on with the 60GHz radios backed off by 3dB if the AP is getting 802.3af power, which is way better than it not working at all unless it gets 802.3at power. You can see the full product demonstration in this Mobility Field Day 3 video and witness the graceful failover of the link from the 60GHz to the 5GHz radio without dropping the link. Skip to the 15 minute mark to see the link demo.

Aruba Powering Next Gen Mobility with Eric Johnson and Onno Harms from Stephen Foskett on Vimeo.

All of this is bringing me to this point. Doing outdoor mesh/point-to-point site surveys just got that much easier. The AP-387 weighs a fraction of the 17 pound (7.7 kilo) Cisco 1522 I used for my last outdoor survey (circa 2010).

I'll leave you with this video I made to document the insanity of me getting that 87 pound (40 kilo) site survey kit into the back of a Volvo 240 wagon once I'd completed the survey. Times have sure changed in what feels like a short eight years!

Meraki's LittleTable Isn't So Little Anymore #MFD3

Way, way back in 2013, I attended Wireless Field Day 4 and I heard a presentation by Sean Rhea of Meraki about their backend database LittleTable, how it was developed, how it worked and how it grew. A few highlights of Sean's presentation covered the server redundancy with data-center redundancy, service provider redundancy and location-redundancy. At that point, the scale per server was a few thousand Meraki devices (switches, wireless Access Points, MXs), hundreds of thousands of clients and hundreds of Gigs of data. The presentation was fascinating to say the least. Recently I had the opportunity to be brought up to date on the status of the Meraki LittleTable database by Jeevan Patil (PM for wireless) and I was a delegate at Mobility Field Day 3 (MFD3).

Meraki has a new (beta) feature in their dashboard called Wireless Health. It is a new feature they enabled in their dashboard that supports all of the Meraki access point models and didn't require their customers to add any additional licensing (or costs) to get this data. Approximately 750,000 networks worldwide now have the ability to see data on poorly performing client devices and access points in a single click. I powered on my older Meraki MR34 access points and added two new MR42 access points to my home (it is a 1928 Florida Faraday cage) and waited for the metrics to trickle into my dashboard.

Now I can see which of my client devices are behaving badly (authentication failures and latency issues). The LittleTable database is so efficient that over 250 billion rows written and one trillion rows queried to the database per day and millions of network devices deployed across 230,000 customers check-in to the dashboard daily. Dashboard.merkaki.com serves 800 million pages to 100 million clients who connect to the dashboard every day. The data in the dashboard is refreshed every second, this makes it extremely useful for troubleshooting. Now I know it is my iOS device is having the worst experience, which makes sense because my apple watch is often left on the charger and not on my wrist. It probably is having a hard time talking to my phone. They're rarely in the same room and my phone rarely has bluetooth enabled.

The Meraki dashboard is amazingly responsive (usually within a second of a click). The responsiveness of the dashboard is pretty amazing considering how many queries are being called every second to the backend database, all across the globe at any given time.

If you want to be brought up to date on what's happening at Meraki, I suggest you check out their video from MFD3 if you haven't already.



Cisco Meraki Mobility Updates from Stephen Foskett on Vimeo.

Mobility Field Day 3 Approacheth #MFD3

Mobility Field Day is coming sooon. September 12-14th I will gather with 11 other MFD delegates in San Jose to take part in Mobility Field Day 3! I haven't taken part in a full length Tech Field Day event since Wireless Field Day 8 (and that was a long, long time ago!). A lot has changed since then and I'm looking forward to hearing the latest news from the participating sponsors: Arista, Aruba, Cisco, Fortinet, Mist, Netscout and Nyansa.