Best Practices for Using Locators as Data Gateways

The Gateway feature enables the use of the existing Quuppa positioning infrastructure to gather third party information from the tags and devices in the tracked environment. This means that in addition to location data, the Quuppa system can be used to collect various other kinds of data from Bluetooth® enabled devices in the environment (e.g. heart rate, humidity and temperature sensor data) without the need for additional gateway hardware.

This section will walk you through the ways to optimise your system, when using the Locators as gateways for third party data. To learn more about how to use the feature, please refer the Use the Locator Gateway Filters section of this guide.

Optimising Locator Configurations

• Exclude the gateway Locators from positioning - You can choose whether you would like the Locators that have the gateway feature enabled to also participate in Direction Finding, or whether you would prefer that the device is dedicated only to collecting gateway data. One of the advantages of using dedicated Locators for the gateway feature is that by excluding those Locators form positioning (by setting their scan mode to Proximity), the deployment of that Locator becomes simpler as Locators that don't participate in positioning don't need to be mounted into a fixed position on the ceiling or positioned and focused accurately into the project file.
• Reduce the number of data gateway Locators - As the gateway feature uses the Locator's communication radio, which is not affected by the Locator Sensitivity settings applied to the Locator's positioning radio, the gateway Locators will be able to pick up data packets even when the transmitting devices are far away. This means that you don't need to use all of the Locator's in your project to provide good gateway coverage for the environment. Instead, it is possible to select strategic Locators around the deployment and set just them to use the gateway feature.
• Use different Locators for the data gateway and Locator broadcasting - Both the data gateway feature and the Locator broadcasting feature use the Locator's communication radio. When the same Locator is used for both features, the Locator will alternate between scanning and broadcasting. While for most cases, the system will provide good enough performance, in some denser deployments it may be more efficient to set different Locators to scan for data than those used for broadcasting.

Optimising Filters

• More advanced filtering logic - By default, the filters and filter groups in the QSP set the Locator to scan for any data packets that fulfill at least one of the applied filtering conditions. For most projects, this simple logic is sufficient as the requirement is to set the system to scan for a certain type of data packet. However, in some cases, you may need to apply some more sophisticated filtering logic. For example, if you need to scan for a certain type of data packet but want to exclude another type of data packet completely. If your use case requires such (i.e. more advanced) filtering logic, then please contact Quuppa directly.

Optimising System Reliability

• Note that under heavy load, the Locators may reboot - In cases where heavy load is generated, the Locators may reboot occasionally and this downtime may affect the system's positioning quality during the reboot. For mission critical use cases, this should be taken into account during the planning phase. For example, by adding a few additional Locators to the project.