Location Engine on the Controller

Location Engine tracks location of multiple clients simultaneously and returns position relative to the floor plan. The following are components of the Location Engine:

• Heat Map. The Location Engine generates a heat map of each AP on a user-provided floor plan. The Location Engine analyzes the floor plan and considers the presence and material of structures or obstacles, such as walls, when calculating the predictive coverage map.

  Extreme Management Center™ is required to define the floor plan. Be sure to include the presence of walls and obstacles when defining the floor plan. For information about defining a floor plan, see the Extreme Management Center™ User Guide.

• Localization algorithms. Location Engine algorithms scan all APs that report the client and select RSS readings from three or more APs that are most likely to provide the best location estimates. Using the selected RSS readings, location is triangulated and returned as the Catresian coordinates relative to the floor plan.
• Notification. Location is reported immediately on a real-time stream and as a notification on the event stream (syslog). The controller tracks the client location and can determine when a client is inside a predefined area. You can define up to 16 areas of interest per floor map using Extreme Management Center. The Location Engine offers a Track Area Change feature, that, when enabled, triggers a notification each time a client moves from one area to another. The notification events can be used for improved radio resource management such as Network Access Control (NAC). For information about how to enable Track Area Change, see Configuring the Location Engine.
• Simultaneous updates. Location Engine simultaneously updates the location of tracked clients. It can track the number of clients that can be supported by the controller. If the controller is part of an availability pair, it can also track the clients supported by the availability partner, and Location Engine is not restricted by floor size.

Client location is presented in Extreme Management Center. Extreme Management Center Floor Plan illustrates a blue pin placed on the most probable position of the client. The map is colored according to the expected probably of the client position . Black is the most likely and yellow is the least likely position.

Extreme Management Center Floor Plan