Integration: Aruba Access Points

Integration with Aruba Wi-Fi infrastructure to detect Sensolus BLE tags or trackers with BLE iBeacon advertising enabled.

Introduction

Aruba, a division of HP Enterpise networking builds enterprise WIFI infrastructure solutions. Some of their access points also support Bluetooth tag detection. This opens interesting opportunities where the existing access point infrastructure of your organization is used to detect BLE tags or trackers where the BLE beaconing is enabled.

Solution architecture

Aruba access points are positioned in a building to provide Wi-Fi infrastructure. They also have a BLE radio which can periodically scan for assets which advertise over Bluetooth. All this data is relayed to the controller. On that controller an external access point can be configured to push all this data towards the Sensolus platform. On the Sensolus platform the location of every access point is configured and the detected tags are mapped to the location of that access point.
Figure 1. Aruba-Sensolus Integration solution architecture

The benefit of the solution is that the already existing infrastructure is used to introduce BLE tag scanning. The downside is that the accuracy is limited to the density of the access point grid. The only points which can ever come out are the locations of the access points. Typically access points are deployed from the perspective of providing the best Wi-Fi coverage, not necessarily the best location coverage. Of course it is perfectly possible to extend the deployment to improve the location accuracy.