Mar 27, 2015Several companies, including sports arenas, hotels and shopping areas, are piloting a new beacon-management dashboard provided by network technology company Cisco. Using Cisco's Connected Mobile Experience (CMX 10.0) software and Wi-Fi access points fitted with Bluetooth Low Energy (BLE) modules, the dashboard (part of the company's CMX 10.0 platform) can calculate the locations of Bluetooth beacons and place them on an indoor map. By viewing the map, users can verify the locations of beacons installed on their premises, as well as determine when the devices are moved or may be placed too close together, and thus need to be re-deployed in such a way that they do not interfere with each other's transmissions. Users can also ascertain if any beacons were installed by an unauthorized party.
A number of years ago, Cisco began offering its Mobility Services Engine (MSE) software, initially intended to detect the locations of Wi-Fi based devices, such as smartphones, laptops or tablets, and to manage data regarding their movements, mostly for security purposes, explains Prashanth Shenoy, Cisco's senior marketing director of enterprise networking and mobility. By knowing where devices are located, he says, a company could identify the movements of individuals in areas, for instance, where they should not be.
Once the software was commercially available and in use by customers, however, retailers indicated that they saw value in tracking the movements of those customers (by counting the signals sent by their mobile phones) to better manage their stores and product displays. Companies such as big-box retailers that have limited store personnel on-hand wanted to be able to track where and when shoppers congregated, and thereby create a planogram according to people's movements.
The Mobility Services Engine solution, Shenoy says, led to development of the CMX 10.0, a platform that uses MSE enterprise software for location data management, and also comes with a software development kit (SDK) to allow developers to create apps, so that a company could forward data relevant to a specific location to a user of that app, based on where that individual is located. In this way, similarly to BLE, the technology can bring relevant content to an individual based on his or her location. CMX 10.0 tracks the locations of Wi-Fi-enabled devices, as well as beacons.
Approximately 650 companies are using the technology to date, he notes, including MGM Resorts and Miami Children's Hospital. For instance, the Bellagio app allows individuals to find MGM Resorts businesses throughout Las Vegas, as well as identify the location of a place of interest, such as a coffee shop or a conference room within a hotel.
Bluetooth beacons offer similar functionality, but with greater location granularity. For instance, while Wi-Fi-based systems can indicate a person is in a specific department of a large store, a BLE beacon solution can pinpoint that location to a specific aisle, or to a point in front of a particular display. Wi-Fi nodes can be installed as far as 2,500 feet apart, while beacons can be installed at a density ten times that amount or more, in order to bring location data to within a few feet.
During the past year or so, Cisco has been in conversations with customers that are using (or planning to use) beacons for that kind of highly granular location-based data, and Cisco's MSE-based system for tracking location via Wi-Fi where beacons aren't needed. Those customers told Cisco that beacons could be difficult to manage. They had no way of knowing where the beacons were located once they were installed—if the janitorial staff inadvertently moved the beacons, or if they were stolen, workers had no way to determine this without physically walking around the facility searching for them.
Of perhaps greater concern, Shenoy says, was the potential for rogue beacons to be deployed in an existing beacon network. For instance, if a retailer at a mall were using beacons to push promotional information or other data to app users, other businesses or individuals could install their own beacon to provide content of which the retailer were unaware. To protect consumers and retailers from this kind of activity, Cisco developed the beacon-management dashboard for the CMX 10.0 platform.
To use the system, a company would deploy beacons, each of which has a unique identifier that it transmits via BLE. Cisco has added a module to its Wi-Fi access points, allowing them to capture the beacon transmission and forward that data to the server, just as the Wi-Fi transmission can be forwarded. The deployment needs to take into account the fact that a beacon's transmission range is shorter than that of a Wi-Fi device. That might mean installing additional access points in areas in which beacons are used, if they were installed in a large space.
The system can operate with most beacon models. When a beacon deployment is first set up or when new beacons are installed and configured, each beacon's intended location is input into the MSE software. A BLE-enabled access point captures each beacon's transmissions. Then, based on that access point's location, the MSE software identifies the beacon's whereabouts and displays that information on a map of the facility (just a single access point is used to identify the device's location, within that access point's range). If a beacon were moved, its transmission would be received by a different access point, indicating a new location, whereas a rogue beacon would send an unrecognized identifier. In both cases, an alert could then be sent to the authorized manager to investigate.
Additionally, the system could issue an alert in the event that a beacon simply stops transmitting, indicating it either needs a battery replacement or has been removed from the site.
The beacon-management dashboard is now being trialed by several companies. In each case, they are testing CMX 10.0 not only to identify and display where beacons are located, but also to manage both Wi-Fi- and beacon-based data. For example, the companies are using their own smartphone apps to provide promotional or informational data to their customers or visitors. With CMX 10.0, they can forward data to an individual's phone based on his or her location, as determined by either Wi-Fi or beacon transmissions. In the case of beacons, a person's smartphone would receive a transmission prompting the app to display information delivered by content-management software from Cisco, which a company can also use to change that information at any time.
