Overcoming the RTLS Scalability Challenge

Real-Time Locating Systems (RTLS) have at last reached the mindset transition state, where a given technology ceases to be a fresh novelty that attracts customers largely because of curiosity and hyperbolic promises and now must provide proof of fast ROI, ease of deployment, and scalability. While there is a very large potential market for RTLS to grow into, including smart manufacturing, healthcare, proximity services in retail, wayfinding in airports, shopping malls, and hotels, among others, adoption of RTLS has been relatively slow, and many potential consumers are still skeptical of the IoT. While this slow adoption can be attributed to many factors, the most important one is scalability, which is the selective pressure that will drive the consolidation of the currently fragmented RTLS ecosystem.

Having noticed this trend, many solution providers have come up with their own ways to address the issue, and there are three major fronts on which RTLS companies are acting to improve their scalability: infrastructure, tags, and interoperability. When it comes to the first, businesses are finding ways to reduce as much as possible the necessary infrastructure to deploy and streamline the installation process so it can be done in a matter of a few days rather than months. For example, solutions may leverage existing Low-Power Wide Area (LPWA) and cellular networks, like Wyres, which places LoRa beacons and tags on site without the necessity for local backhaul infrastructure, since they relay their data directly to the LoRaWAN. These kinds of solutions also allow for integration between indoor and outdoor tracking of assets, which is of great interest to the manufacturing and transportation industries.

Another way to reduce installation time and cabling prices is to use mesh networking techniques. This is the approach favored by Ubudu, which works with BLE technology. Further, because anchor points can contribute significantly to the total solution cost, often priced at hundreds of dollars each, leveraging existing Access Point (AP) infrastructure like that of Wi-Fi can solve two issues with one solution. Aruba is deploying Wi-Fi APs that also possess BLE beacon capabilities for tracking and relaying data over the Wi-Fi network, at virtually no extra cost. Thus, depending on the tracking accuracy needed, the Internet connectivity AP deployment density is already enough for RTLS purposes. However, for sub-meter accuracy, one needs to install extra anchor points on top of the existing Wi-Fi infrastructure.

On the tag side, the current race is to diminish their individual costs as much as possible, so that they can be integrated into smart assets or attached to pallets and containers in large volumes without constituting an exorbitant investment to the customer. One possible approach for this is to invest in passive tags, like UWINLOC and Wiliot have decided to do. These have in their offerings passive UWB and BLE tags, respectively. While it is unlikely that these will be able to reach passive RFID prices, they are considerably cheaper than their active counterparts. For instance, active BLE or UWB tags can cost anywhere from a few dollars to tens of dollars each, whereas passive tag prices can be brought down to less than a dollar. The cases in which active or passive tags will be used are determined by the customer’s needs, since because of the power constraints of passive tags, they often cannot carry the sensors present in active ones, thus being largely unsuitable for monitoring. Challenging environments with many moving metal parts and areas with the need for a wide detection range also make the use of passive tags less attractive.

Moving forward, RTLS companies will be expected to have ready-made and easy deployment options that can either be applied to a wide variety of use cases or be tailored to specific uses from the customer’s side. Besides the Wi-Fi AP with RTLS already discussed, another trend being favored by companies like Ubudu and Roambee is technology integration. This involves hybridizing technologies on the anchor point like BLE and UWB so that tags of either standard may be applied to assets depending on the environment, accuracy requirements, and coverage.

Another mixing of technologies that is being investigated is indoors RTLS with outdoors LPWAN or GNSS, which is of special interest for companies tracking assets between warehouses. Furthermore, clients do not wish to be completely committed to one company once they have selected a solution, and it is expected that this consolidation phase will also serve to standardize the technologies’ protocols, so that a client may purchase anchor points from company A, passive tags from company B, and active tags from company C, without facing compatibility issues, as long as the technology is the same. In the RTLS space, there are companies already becoming “tag partners” as a first step towards this standard. Some of the companies that have adopted such a strategy include Aruba, Kontakt.io, and Quuppa. Other enterprises like Estimote are betting instead on open software and easy-to-deploy hardware, so that consumers may personalize their solutions themselves, rather than relying on the provider to tailor it to their use case.

As such, ABI Research sees that investing in shared standards and interoperability is important to ensure that businesses, especially large ones with several kinds of establishments and assets, can benefit from the freedom of adopting hybrid solutions that tend to their needs, rather than relying on the solution provider to have one personalized offering for every deployment, which is not scalable. In this sense, companies that alienate themselves technologically and do not form partnerships to offer interoperability on the hardware and/or software side are less likely to successfully grow in a scalability-thirsty market. The challenge here is naturally finding a balance between cooperating with other companies and still offering a unique and competitive business model. This is in addition to the effort of bringing anchor point and tag costs down so that RTLS may become accessible to businesses wishing to install location technologies in wide areas or track large asset volumes.

An interesting approach being favored by enterprises like Roambee is that of Location-as-a-Service (LaaS), which works with a subscription plan in such a way that clients do not buy the anchor points and tags, but rather “rent” them as needed for a certain time. While this model is very promising, it can only work if the companies adopting it find ways to reduce installation labor to a minimum. This way, the RTLS tracking capabilities can be deployed and returned on demand at little or no extra cost.

Technology integration is also a promising idea to fit the requirements of environments as different as warehouses, hospitals, airports, and stores. The main challenges in this area will be to ensure that anchor points are cheap enough to justify the investment in hybrid technologies, as well as overcoming the different placement and beacon density needs of each standard. Special attention must also be given to how RTLS data is relayed to the relevant processing unit, be that in the cloud or a server in the facilities. For a solution to be general, it should ideally leverage existing infrastructure or have a simple enough system that is independent of the kind and size of the deployment. It remains to be seen which models will emerge victorious from this consolidation stage, but they will certainly be the ones that successfully develop a fully scalable business model with low-cost technologies that require a streamlined installation infrastructure and give freedom to the consumer.