Indoor Location Services

Indoor location services use advanced wireless technologies to enable the continuous tracking of people and objects within a defined space, such as a multi-story building, warehouse, or retail store. The services deliver a high degree of accuracy in locations where GPS and other satellite technologies lack precision or simply don’t work.

Organizations often use indoor location services to understand the movement of people for safety and marketing purposes, help customers and visitors navigate their way to a desired location, and find expensive equipment assets that have been lost or misplaced.

A variety of techniques can be used in conjunction with wireless networks to continually calculate indoor positioning. Juniper converges Wi-Fi with our patented virtual Bluetooth® LE (vBLE) technology to enable the highly accurate, low-cost indoor tracking of client devices, people, and BLE-tagged assets. vBLE uses virtual (software-defined) beacons placed in a floorplan—rather than physical beacons—to enable the analysis and triangulation of mobile devices. This approach allows our customers to more precisely and affordably locate devices, provide wayfinding and proximity notifications, and optimize deployment scalability, resiliency, and flexibility.

Our customers often use Juniper Indoor Location Services for the following:

• Indoor navigation and wayfinding in shopping malls, airports, hospitals, schools, and other large buildings
• Proximity-based marketing, merchandising, and targeted advertising 
• Asset tracking and inventory management in warehouses, manufacturing locations, hospitals, and other large facilities
• Indoor analytics and heat mapping applications that help them understand customer behavior and foot traffic

Implementing Juniper Indoor Location Services requires the use of Juniper Wi-Fi or Bluetooth® access points that support vBLE technology. From there, you can choose between three separate Indoor Location Service subscription options:

• Juniper Mist Asset Visibility for tracking tagged assets/personnel wherever they may be in your defined environment 
• Juniper Mist User Engagement for delivering location-based user experiences such as wayfinding and contextual notifications throughout your environment 
• Juniper Mist Premium Analytics, which provides you with up to 13 months of historical data and analysis

Using vBLE beacons/tags, Juniper’s solution delivers location accuracy of 1 to 3 meters.

• Full integration with the Juniper Mist cloud dashboard provides a single pane of glass for network operators to manage their wired, wireless, and SD-WAN location services. This single interface provides all the tools and capabilities needed to manage and monitor implemented location services and make changes when necessary. 
• Premium analytics enable end-to-end network observability and deliver business intelligence to IT networking and line-of-business users. Juniper Indoor Location is the only service of its kind to offer long-term data storage for full-stack network and location insights.
• The solution eliminates the need to physically mount and move hardware BLE beacons and replace their batteries.

Yes, all services can be enabled at the same time via controls in the Juniper Mist dashboard.

All Juniper Access Points with integrated BLE or vBLE support can enable our location services. Those APs with our patented 16-element directional vBLE antenna array are ideally suited for use cases that require the highest possible level of location accuracy.

Juniper invented virtual beacons to enable location-specific messages, which can be displayed anywhere on a floor plan. The message, range, and location are completely configurable using software, such as the Juniper Mist UI or APIs.

Our APs support an unlimited number of virtual beacons, which emulate discrete, physical beacons. This approach eliminates the need for large volumes of physical beacons—which eventually will require battery replacement—thus reducing deployment and operating costs without compromising functionality. Similarly, you can move virtual beacons with the simple click of a mouse (or via APIs), rather than physically moving physical beacons. This delivers a more scalable and cost-effective solution for infusing location context into your wireless deployment.