Companies across a range of industries are seeing substantial business benefits from tracking the real-time location, status and condition of mobile assets such as personnel, work-in-process or equipment. Integrating such visibility information directly into business applications can significantly improve operational efficiency, optimize asset utilization and increase quality and safety.

Yet, enjoying the benefits of enterprise visibility has traditionally been an expensive and complex undertaking because different types of location services often require different solutions with separate network infrastructures and software. Organizations using RFID, sensors and telemetry systems without a common denominator or central repository for the various data sources are discovering that they have to live with disparate dedicated networks and silos of location and status information.

A new approach, Unified Asset Visibility (UAV), is changing everything. With UAV, enterprises can now achieve true enterprise visibility without the complication and cost of numerous separate systems. UAV solutions combine various sources of location, status and condition data – including Active RFID, Passive RFID, GPS and advanced sensors – over standard Wi-Fi networks, into a single platform.

Leveraging Wi-Fi networks is key to deploying UAV solutions. These networks are pervasive, which means organizations can leverage their existing infrastructure. In addition, Wi-Fi RFID tags that beacon information, instead of associating with access points (and thus do not require their own IP addresses and maintain long battery life), enable enterprises to implement large-scale UAV solutions with tens of thousands of tags, while still keeping network utilization low. This method also enables support of future 802.11 standards, such as 802.11n.

Once the core and standards-based Wi-Fi infrastructure for visibility is established, a wide variety of consolidated solutions are enabled for organizations. They can deploy telemetry and sensor applications, such as temperature, humidity, pressure and vehicle diagnostics, over the Wi-Fi network. The point of scan of Passive RFID tags can be determined by locating the mobile reader’s Wi-Fi client. Basing a solution on the core Wi-Fi network also enables asset visibility in any environment throughout the entire enterprise. For example, dual mode Wi-Fi and GPS tags on assets in large outdoor areas utilize Wi-Fi for backhauling the GPS data onto the centralized application. In addition, dual mode Wi-Fi and Ultra-Wideband tags deliver Wi-Fi visibility throughout an entire facility and then Ultra-Wideband only in areas where very high accuracy (sub 1 meter) is required.

With UAV, a single vendor can provide all of an enterprise’s asset visibility needs, and the integrated solutions will grow and develop in a coordinated manner. Enterprises around the world are already using UAV solutions to gain this visibility and ultimately achieve significant business value in efficiency, productivity and product quality.

Daniel Aljadeff, Chief Technology Officer, joined AeroScout in 2001 and served as SVP R&D from 2002 until 2007, and brought a wealth of experience in the development of a wide variety of positioning and digital communication systems. Prior to joining AeroScout, he was co-General Manager and VP R&D of WaveLinks where he oversaw the development of spread spectrum location and distance measurement technology in the ISM band. At Tadiran, he led a large development team to implement a vehicle location system that is used extensively today throughout the US and Israel. In addition, Mr. Aljadeff has completed a variety of projects in the fields of digital communication, video & signal processing and radar signal analysis. Mr. Aljadeff holds several patents and earned a BSc in Electrical Engineering from Ben Gurion University, Israel, and an MSc in Electrical Engineering from the Technion in Haifa, Israel.

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