Traditional RSSI Location Vs Cisco’s Hyperlocation Accuracy Real World Results Part 1 – The Walled Office

I recently installed a building with an RTLS design, along with Hyperlocation modules installed. The customer was looking to get 1-3m accuracy for associated devices. This building is a walled office, and Cisco Best practices for Hyperlocation state that the hyperlocation APs need line of sight between them which we don’t have in this building.

I marked out on a map a number of locations to take location accuracy tests from:

Accuracy Map2.png — Map of the Floor with points that accuracy tests were conducted from

I then used Cisco CMX to perform a location accuracy test:

CMX ACCURACY TEST1 — Selecting Client Device

CMX ACCURACY TEST2 — Starting Location Accuracy Test

CMX ACCURACY TEST3 — Select the correct location of the device

CMX ACCURACY TEST4 — Results of the accuracy test

The tests were conducted using a MacBook Air and a Samsung Galaxy S6 Edge.

RTLS Results:

Caveat: In order to speed up the location sample collections inSSIDer was ran on both the devices to speed up the number of probes sent which CMX uses for location calculations.

CMX RTLS Accuracy tests1

CMX RTLS Accuracy tests2.png

Hyperlocation Results

Hyperlocation 1

Hyperlocation 2

Differences:

CMX Results Accuracy tests1.png

CMX Results Accuracy tests2.png

Conclusions:

In my opinion for the additional costs involved to install Hyperlocation within a “walled office” environment I can not see the ROI benefits. Until I repeat this test in a “open planned” environment the jury is still out in whether Hyperlocation gives any huge benefits over a traditional RSSI location service.

That being said one benefit that Hyperlocation did give was that the location accuracy was more correct more of the time compared to the RSSI location calculations.

THE WLAN