Insights about traffic patterns – including most traversed paths, dwell times and repeat visitor frequency – are correlated with other data sources, such as sensors, loyalty databases, and point-of-sale systems.

This enables enterprises to optimize real estate, merchandise locations, evaluate marketing effectiveness, offer guests and employees more personalized experiences and improve overall operational effectiveness.

Services Supported by Ale

Associated and unassociated HPE Aruba Networking Wi-Fi client information is received and decoded by ALE. With this information, ALE performs three primary functions:

• − Extract contextual information from the network, including user identity and roles, device types and application usage.
• − Calculate location for associated and unassociated clients based on received signal-strength information or simply indicate the presence of a device in proximity to a specific AP.
• − Forward and store contextual user and location data and present it to third-party applications/services through standard polling or publish-subscribe streaming APIs.

Analytics

Third-party analytics engines and big-data mining services analyze traffic flows and patterns and aggregate this data with loyalty databases and other business systems to provide a better understanding about customer behavior.

Within this analytics architecture, ALE aggregates as much opt-in information as possible from the WLAN and feeds it to a third-party analytics engine in the HPE Aruba Networking partner ecosystem. A presence feed indicates that a device is within range of the WLAN, and an events feed indicates when a device enters, crosses or leaves a predefined geofenced area.

Venues that need to know what types of devices enter their location can use ALE to procure the manufacturer, model, operating system DHCP and the browser user-agent (the line of text that identifies the browser) and the operating system to the web server. Venues can also observe app usage and destination URLs by monitoring data-plane traffic from the device.

ALE publishes this information via feeds to which third-party analytics engines can subscribe. Third-party analytics engines store the opt-in information in a database and analyze it with other opt-in sources of data that may include:

• − Consumer online search and purchase history.
• − Consumer point-of-sale records for in-store purchases.
• − Demographics about the opted-in customer, including geographic location, birthday and family information.
• − Environmental information like hot, cold or rainy day, public holiday or weekend, and seasonal influences.
• − Other data-mining sources that are useful in revealing patterns in consumer activity.

HPE Aruba Networking Analytics and Location Engine and Privacy

Businesses and the analytics industry are rightly aware of the sensitivity of personally identifiable information (PII). By default, all PII gathered from ALE is anonymous, including user identities and device MAC and IP addresses.

HPE Aruba Networking strongly recommends reviewing privacy policies with local regulators before implementing any data collection activities in public venues and to always ensure that users agree to terms and conditions.

System overview

• − HPE Aruba Networking Analytics and Location Engine is deployed as a virtual machine (VM) image.

  • • One VM image, delivered as an OVA file, can be deployed with various hardware configurations – for CPU, memory, hard disk – based on scale requirements (see below).
  • • CentOS 6.4 pre-installed with all needed dependencies.
• − Supported on VMware ESX/ESXi 5.0 or higher.
• − ALE requires a connection to HPE Aruba Networking Management Software (AirWave) ™ network management VisualRF™ module to show a site map with AP locations. For small venues with 1-2 APs where presence is required but not triangulated location, ALE supports a mapless feature when used with HPE Aruba Networking Instant APs.