Open Locate Deployment Guide

Architecture, deployment and troubleshooting guidance for HPE Aruba Networking Central’s Open Locate feature.

HPE Aruba Networking Open Locate is an initiative designed to standardize and enhance indoor location services across enterprise environments, aiming to improve the accuracy, flexibility, and interoperability of location-based solutions by leveraging multiple positioning technologies. To ensure seamless integration across various platforms, Open Locate also focuses on enabling the HPE Aruba Networking Access Points to broadcast their location, also known as location coordination information (LCI), through APIs and standardized protocols, including Wi-Fi and Bluetooth Low Energy (BLE). This allows third-party applications and ecosystem partners to leverage real-time location data more effectively, driving innovation in asset tracking, indoor positioning, and other location-based services.

The current landscape of Wi-Fi location solutions requires manual placement of APs on a digitized floor plan for a location-aware infrastructure.  This can be time-consuming, resource-intensive, and prone to user error. Open Locate and HPE Aruba Networking Central delivers automatic placement of APs on a floor plan, empowering workplace owners to eliminate operational bottlenecks and enhancing their overall efficiency.

A key component of Wi-Fi-based locationing using the Fine Timing Measurement (802.11mc) protocol, which utilizes time-of-flight techniques to measure distances between access points and devices and enhance location accuracy. Support for FTM was introduced with the Wi-Fi 6 family of APs and is available with all AP models introduced since then. To explore use cases and understand how APs can auto-locate themselves to enable highly accurate indoor positioning using Open Locate, watch Delivering Accurate Indoor Location Services at Scale.

To support automatic AP placement the Central floorplan manager facilitates the seamless placement of APs on the floor plan. The floorplan manager forms the foundational layer by anchoring a digital floor plan to geo-referenced map services thereby automatically scaling the floor plan based on latitude and longitude coordinates.


Last modified: April 11, 2025 (bd5a28c)