Indoor Location Services

Bluetooth® LE location services for the AI-Driven Enterprise.

Indoor location services are critical to revolutionizing the user experience. Increasingly, enterprises require real-time cloud location services that combine personalization, data analytics, and operational simplicity to deliver turn-by-turn navigation and comprehensive visibility—all while reducing operational costs through intelligent automation.

Driven by Mist AI™, the Juniper Mist cloud architecture converges Wi-Fi and Juniper-patented virtual Bluetooth® LE (vBLE) technology to enable indoor location services that deliver optimum location accuracy and unparalleled user experiences. With Juniper vBLE technology, no battery-powered beacons or manual calibration are required. You can quickly deploy an unlimited number of virtual beacons with ease.

Juniper Mist Indoor Location Services include User Engagement, Asset Visibility, Premium Analytics, and Contact Tracing.

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Flexibility

  • On-premises microservices
  • First in the industry to support third-party tags
 
 

Scalability

  • Unsupervised machine learning
  • Global path loss formulas, crowdsourced
 
 

Resiliency

  • Reduced reckoning on mobile devices through sensor fusion
  • Location engine algorithms in the mobile device
 
 

A Magic Quadrant Leader

Gartner positions Juniper Networks as a Leader and furthest in Completeness of Vision in the 2023 Gartner® Magic Quadrant™ for Indoor Location Services.
See why we're a Leader in this report

How Juniper can help

Our smart Wi-Fi and patented vBLE solutions deliver location services accurate to between one and three meters. You can use them to quickly find equipment and other assets. Or engage in new ways with customers, patients, and guests through their mobile phones with promotions, greetings, and step-by-step directions. You can also protect employee and guest health with our Contact Tracing location service.

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Improve experiences and revenue

  • Real-time wayfinding with accurate (1- to 3-meter) turn-by-turn navigation
  • Real-time proximity notifications and alerts
  • 100% programmable via SDK
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Locate assets and gain workflow insights

  • Identify assets by name and view their location
  • Zonal and room accuracy for third-party tags
  • APIs for viewing assets and analytics
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Accelerate digital transformation

  • End-to-end network visibility
  • Orchestrated networking and application performance queries
  • Customer segmentation and reporting based on visitor telemetry

Related Solutions

Wireless Access

AI-driven automation and insight, coupled with the agility and reliability of a microservices cloud, deliver optimized wireless access experiences and simplified network operations.

AIOps Driven by Mist AI

Juniper transforms IT operations with Mist AI and a virtual network assistant for self-driving capabilities and AI-driven support. Mist AI optimizes user experiences from client to cloud and simplifies IT operations across the WLAN, LAN, and WAN. 

AI-Driven Contact Tracing

In addition to keeping IT systems accessible during a disaster, your business continuity plan should promote worker continuity in the face of a pandemic. The Juniper Contact Tracing solution, built on Mist AI-driven analytics, self-driving Wi-Fi, and patented vBLE technology.

CUSTOMER SUCCESS

Veterans receive proper care through wireless with Mist AI. The U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs’ Orlando VA Medical Center (VAMC) serves more than 400,000 veterans across a brand-new 65-acre, 1.2 million square-foot facility. As a state-of-the-art medical center, the Orlando VAMC is constantly looking for innovative ways to leverage technology to deliver a high-touch experience to patients, guests, and staff.

Download the story

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Technology partners

Find technology partners that deliver amazing wired and wireless experiences through product interoperability and joint sales and marketing efforts.

Why Juniper is outpacing the competition

As you build out your network, check out this wired and wireless LAN comparison guide. See how Juniper, driven by Mist AI, stacks up against Cisco, Cisco Meraki, and Aruba/Hewlett Packard Enterprise.

See Mist AI in action

Join our weekly demo to see how we deliver the industry’s best access-layer experience for wired and wireless networks.

Indoor Location FAQs

What are indoor location services?

Indoor location services use advanced wireless technologies to enable the continuous tracking of people and objects within a defined space, such as a multi-story building, warehouse, or retail store. The services deliver a high degree of accuracy in locations where GPS and other satellite technologies lack precision or simply don’t work.

What’s the purpose of indoor location services?

Organizations often use indoor location services to understand the movement of people for safety and marketing purposes, help customers and visitors navigate their way to a desired location, and find expensive equipment assets that have been lost or misplaced.

How do indoor location services work?

A variety of techniques can be used in conjunction with wireless networks to continually calculate indoor positioning. Juniper converges Wi-Fi with our patented virtual Bluetooth® LE (vBLE) technology to enable the highly accurate, low-cost indoor tracking of client devices, people, and BLE-tagged assets. vBLE uses virtual (software-defined) beacons placed in a floorplan—rather than physical beacons—to enable the analysis and triangulation of mobile devices. This approach allows our customers to more precisely and affordably locate devices, provide wayfinding and proximity notifications, and optimize deployment scalability, resiliency, and flexibility.

What are the most common use cases for Juniper vBLE-based location services?

Our customers often use Juniper Indoor Location Services for the following:

  • Indoor navigation and wayfinding in shopping malls, airports, hospitals, schools, and other large buildings
  • Proximity-based marketing, merchandising, and targeted advertising 
  • Asset tracking and inventory management in warehouses, manufacturing locations, hospitals, and other large facilities
  • Indoor analytics and heat mapping applications that help them understand customer behavior and foot traffic

What are the components of Juniper Indoor Location Services?

Implementing Juniper Indoor Location Services requires the use of Juniper Wi-Fi or Bluetooth® access points that support vBLE technology. From there, you can choose between three separate Indoor Location Service subscription options:

  • Juniper Mist Asset Visibility for tracking tagged assets/personnel wherever they may be in your defined environment 
  • Juniper Mist User Engagement for delivering location-based user experiences such as wayfinding and contextual notifications throughout your environment 
  • Juniper Mist Premium Analytics, which provides you with up to 13 months of historical data and analysis

How accurate are Juniper Indoor Location Services?

Using vBLE beacons/tags, Juniper’s solution delivers location accuracy of 1 to 3 meters.

What unique advantages do Juniper’s Indoor Location Services provide?

  • Full integration with the Juniper Mist cloud dashboard provides a single pane of glass for network operators to manage their wired, wireless, and SD-WAN location services. This single interface provides all the tools and capabilities needed to manage and monitor implemented location services and make changes when necessary. 
  • Premium analytics enable end-to-end network observability and deliver business intelligence to IT networking and line-of-business users. Juniper Indoor Location is the only service of its kind to offer long-term data storage for full-stack network and location insights.
  • The solution eliminates the need to physically mount and move hardware BLE beacons and replace their batteries.

Can a customer use User Engagement, Asset Visibility, and Premium Analytics services together?

Yes, all services can be enabled at the same time via controls in the Juniper Mist dashboard.

What wireless access points support Juniper Indoor Location Services?

All Juniper Access Points with integrated BLE or vBLE support can enable our location services. Those APs with our patented 16-element directional vBLE antenna array are ideally suited for use cases that require the highest possible level of location accuracy.

What are virtual beacons?

Juniper invented virtual beacons to enable location-specific messages, which can be displayed anywhere on a floor plan. The message, range, and location are completely configurable using software, such as the Juniper Mist UI or APIs.

Our APs support an unlimited number of virtual beacons, which emulate discrete, physical beacons. This approach eliminates the need for large volumes of physical beacons—which eventually will require battery replacement—thus reducing deployment and operating costs without compromising functionality. Similarly, you can move virtual beacons with the simple click of a mouse (or via APIs), rather than physically moving physical beacons. This delivers a more scalable and cost-effective solution for infusing location context into your wireless deployment.

Gartner Magic Quadrant for Indoor Location Services, Tim Zimmerman, Annette Zimmermann, February 21, 2023.

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