Favendo RTLS Knowledge

GPS is a global positioning system, a global navigation satellite system for positioning in the open air.

Geotargeting (analogue zone alarm) is used when actions such as push notifications are not to be triggered at a certain point, but when entering, leaving or staying in defined zones, e.g. in the entrance area of an exhibition. For example, if a festival visitor who has installed the corresponding app enters the festival area and thus the defined radio signal radius, a push notification is triggered on his or her smartphone. This is independent of the point at which he walks through the imaginary fence.

Geofencing is an made-up word consisting of geographic and fence. Geofencing can be used, for example, to activate an immobilizer when a car leaves a defined zone. The zone can be e.g. a construction site, a festival area or a defined zone within a building.

This term generally refers to a transfer point and means above all a switching device in computer networks or a component (hardware and / or software), which establishes a connection between two systems. The term gateway implies that the forwarded data will be processed. In beacon technology, for example, the Beacon Tracker from the “Relay” series used by Favendo, which receive the beacon signals and forward them to a server, act as gateways.

Firmware is software that is embedded in electronic devices. In this case, it is the “operating system” of the beacon.

Fingerprinting is way of determining the position by means of WLAN infrastructure. Instead of determining the distance between objects and reference points, the fingerprint technique searches for characteristic matches of signals such as RSSI (Received Signal Strength Indication) and MAC address (Media Access Control). For this purpose, first a database acting as a “map” is created with the characteristics of the existing WLAN signals at a specific location and at a specific time. Normally “broadcasts” sent out by WLAN routers are recorded. In later operation, the smartphone sends the signals received within the WLAN infrastructure to a server. There, the signal strength is compared with the signal strengths stored in the “map” and then the position is estimated. This is in turn continuously sent back to the smartphone.

The Bluetooth Low Energy Beacon Profile Eddystone was introduced in 2015 by Google as an alternative to Apple’s iBeacon. It should be noted that this is not a hardware, but a software protocol that is flashed on beacons. The system, which was released as an open-source program and can be used on various platforms, named after a famous lighthouse in front of the coast of Cornwall, because the signal of the beacon is as simple as that of a lighthouse and works also only in one direction. It can be received by all Bluetooth enabled devices. The Google solution makes it possible to send not just an ID via Beacon but also entire web addresses. It is no longer supported by Google.

API stands for “application programming interface”, usually short “programming interface” is a program part, which is made available by a software system to other programs for connection to the system. An API is needed, for example, for connecting and integrating data collected by a beacon infrastructure into an existing enterprise resource planning system or similar.