Location Based Services: Which Technology Sees What You Need?

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Understanding what’s stored in your warehouse and by your lines is useful, to say the least. But you needn’t always know with perfect precision. The technologies that let you localise objects in your halls are several in number. We’ve prepared an outline of which system can do what and when it’s worth considering.

There are several ways to determine locations. From the simplest, but also least precise, wherein you only determine a tracked object’s presence by an access point, to more sophisticated methods, such as TDoA (Time Difference of Arrival), wherein an object’s location is calculated based on triangulation and on capturing a signal at multiple points. WIFI AP, RFID gates and also barcode scanners are examples of the first method. The TDoA method, meanwhile, offers the most precise determination of locations. 

All the mentioned technologies belong to one large set: Location Based Services (LBS). TDoA is also utilised by Ultra Wideband (UWB), which is the foundation for Real Time Location Systems (RTLS) – these use locations to determine both status and motion. Using these technologies, you can both obtain an overview of a chip’s passage through a checkpoint and monitor its current route.

	RFID	BLE	Wi-Fi	UWB
Accuracy	1–5 m	1–3 m	2–5 m	5–30 cm
Purpose	ID only	ID, position	Position	ID, position, motion
Battery usage	medium	low	high	low
Maximum read distance	10 m	10 m	30 m	30 m
Advantages	can use passive, unpowered tags	unique identification	can be combined with data infrastructure	broad possibilities for integration and analytics, high-precision localisation
Disadvantages	complicated infrastructure, risk of misreading	low scalability	low precision, interference-heavy band	large metal objects can block the signal
Usage	identifying goods and materials	detecting presence, low-energy communication	detecting presence	ID; tracking positions precisely