Installation guide

4
Wi-Fi Location-Based Services—Design and Deployment Considerations
OL-11612-01
Overview
It is not hard to understand why this is so. With integrated location tracking, enterprise wireless LANs
become much more valuable as a corporate business asset. Enterprise network administrators, security
personnel, and others directly responsible for the health and well-being of business-class networks have
expressed great interest in LBS to allow them to better address issues in their environments, such as the
following:
• The need to quickly and efficiently locate valuable assets and key personnel
• Improving productivity via effective asset and personnel allocation
• Reducing loss because of the unauthorized removal of assets from company premises
• Improving customer satisfaction by rapid location of critical service-impacting assets
• Improving WLAN planning and tuning capabilities
• Coordinating Wi-Fi device location with security policy enforcement
• Meeting regulatory requirements for E911 calls
This white paper comprehensively discusses the Cisco Location-Based Service solution and the
recommended best practices for design, configuration, installation, and deployment. References to
applicable existing documentation are made throughout this document. A wealth of new material is
provided that addresses such topics as the following:
• The fundamentals of positioning technologies including lateration, angulation, and pattern
recognition approaches
• How Cisco RF Fingerprinting operates and how it compares to other approaches
• Traffic flow analysis between the location appliance and other network components
• In-depth discussion of various RFID tag technologies including vendor-specific configuration
information
• The location appliance Simple Object Access Protocol (SOAP)/eXtensible Markup Language
(XML) API along with an example of a successful implementation
This document ends with several appendices and a section detailing caveats encountered during
production.
Overview
Objectives
This white paper is intended to accomplish the following objectives:
• Providing the reader unfamiliar with location-based services with a basic foundation in technical
aspects of location tracking and positioning systems. Location Tracking Approaches, page 6,
provides substantial background information on positioning systems such as cell of origin, time of
arrival, time difference of arrival, angle of arrival, and pattern recognition.
• Describing and defining RF Fingerprinting, the technology at the heart of the Cisco LBS solution.
Cisco Location-Based Services Architecture, page 18, discusses the similarities and differences
between RF Fingerprinting and the approaches described in Location Tracking Approaches, page 6,
and how RF Fingerprinting addresses the deployment of cost-effective indoor Wi-Fi location
tracking solutions. This knowledge is useful when comparing the Cisco LBS solution to other
approaches for indoor location tracking.