Chapter 11
Precision Locating with Local Area Coverage
In This Chapter
Understanding local area coverage
Exploring the underlying technologies
Location is a key organizing principle in the bricks-and-mortar retail world. It’s part of the business psyche. Businesses know that it’s important to place specific things in specific locations to increase sales. You can see magazines and candies typically placed near checkout stands, for example. And, the commercial success of GPS (Global Positioning System) and the increase in terrorism have spurred everyone’s interest — not just the retailers — to automatically locate anything or anybody in real time, not just outdoors but indoors also.
In Chapter 10, I discuss locating technologies, such as GPS, that support wide area coverage — locating assets or people in areas spanning large geographic areas, such as cities, countries, and the entire world. As I mention in Chapter 10, although wide area coverage implies locating tags in outdoor, urban, or even indoor environments, typically the technologies that support wide area coverage need some assistance (or require use of precision-locating technologies that support local area coverage) to provide high accuracy in local areas, such as within a room, building, campus, or specific metropolitan area.
In this chapter, I provide an overview of the most commonly used technologies that provide precision locating in local areas, including a description of the strengths as well as the vulnerabilities ...
