How Do You Choose the Most Optimal Real

The real-time location market is expected to reach ~$40B by 2030 – almost 10X the market size today; stack the real-time sensor market on top, and the collective market value of Real-Time Location & Sensor Solutions (RTLSS) straddles $100B+ in value. The exponential growth of RTLSS is compounded by a variety of global macroeconomic trends, including:

Indoor RTLSS, in particular, is well-positioned to revolutionize industries such as supply chain, grocery logistics, and healthcare. Today, for example, hospital nurses spend an average of 1 hour per shift looking for misplaced equipment, resulting in millions of dollars lost per year to ‘wasted’ wages and equipment replacement. This, among many other use cases involving asset management, people tracking, and environmental sensoring have expedited adoption of real-time IoT technology across businesses big and small.

The quest to implement RTLSS, however, is riddled with confusion (to say the least). There are multiple radio protocols to consider, and it’s often difficult for business owners to assess which solution works best for each project. We’re here to help with this – for starters, we’ve created a set of 7 important considerations across the most common indoor RTLSS protocols today. Depending on which criteria matters the most for your project (e.g., cost vs. location accuracy, the hassle of set-up vs. scalability), we hope these comparisons provide you with directional guidance on how to choose the ‘optimal’ RTLSS.

Let’s get started!

The most common protocols used in indoor RTLSS today are BLE RSSI – fixed reader (mobile tags), BLE RSSI – fixed tags (mobile reader), BLE AoA, UWB, and Wireless Mesh.

To evaluate each of these protocols for your project, you may want to consider (at least) these 7 important criteria:

At a high level, here’s how each RTLSS technology breaks down on the above-mentioned criteria.

Let’s unpack each evaluation criteria a bit more to aid in choosing RTLSS that’s right for your project:

With all these considerations in mind, here’s what a high-level decision tree might look like for your project:

Hope the above has been helpful! Remember though – there is no ‘one-size-fits-all’; each radio protocol will be ‘optimal’ in different scenarios, and sometimes even the same project may require multiple protocols (e.g., leveraging UWB to obtain sub-meter accuracy in certain project zones while leaning on Wireless Mesh for ease-of-deployment in others).

If you’re interested in exploring how to choose RTLSS – there is much more to unpack and considerations we didn’t have the opportunity to get into, such as the area of deployment layout, compatibility with existing infrastructure, etc. Keep an eye out for analyses on these topics in our future posts!