Indoor Triangulation System by Navizon at WLAN Book.com

October 26th, 2011

Indoor Triangulation System by Navizon

by Zaib Kaleem

Indoor Triangulation System by Navizon

Navizon just announced an “Indoor Triangulation System”, details can be found in this whitepaper. A quick summary of system from whitepaper is below.

“Navizon I.T.S. works in the background, quietly and unobtrusively locating Wi-Fi enabled devices. These devices (stations) are tracked within the coverage area (site) which is determined by a network of nodes. No application is needed on the devices to be tracked. The only requirement is that their Wi-Fi radios be turned on, which is the default in most smart phones, tablets and laptops.

Navizon I.T.S. nodes are small and inconspicuous, and placed approximately within 100 feet of each other to cover a three-dimensional space, the site, which may span a multi-story building or multiple buildings in a campus. Nodes are simply plugged into standard electrical outlets for power. No wiring is necessary, as the nodes automatically configure themselves into a wireless mesh network.”

I’m very interested in this concept [shameless self promotion] because our WLANController.com solution can do indoor WiFi triangulation for access ponts / ad-hoc networks using zero new hardware by leveraging existing computers as sensors / access points.

We have had this capability for a while, see video below and blog entry about feature.

Indoor Triangulation System / WiFi Location Tracking / WIDS/WIPS

Using WiFi “nodes”/sensors is nothing new. Many enterprise class WLAN vendors and dedicated WIDS/WIPS vendors do this today already. To better understand how all these approaches compare to Navizon’s Indoor Triangulation System (ITS) I have the following questions.

1) What is difference between a “Node” and a WiFi sensor?

2) Does device being tracked requirement “is that their Wi-Fi radios be turned on” mean just enabled or actually connected to a WiFi network?

3) These nodes are “meshing” with each other using WiFi so are they also transmitting 802.11 and in 2.4 and/or 5.0 Ghz bands?