Understanding the Shopping Mall and Supermarket IoT Solution - Hotspot Service and Customer Flow Analysis
- Hotspot service: provides WLAN coverage through Portal authentication.
- Customer flow analysis: uses the location function to analyze moving tracks of customers in shopping malls, so that the shopping malls can obtain consumption habits and occupations of the customers, and push customized advertisements to the customers.
Hotspot Service
The hotspot service solution provides the Portal authentication access mode. Customers can use social accounts, email addresses, and phone numbers for authentication. Advertisements can be embedded into the authentication page.
HTTP or HTTPS is used for Portal authentication.
Customer Flow Analysis
Figure 1 shows implementation of the customer flow analysis solution.
APs collect STA information such as the MAC address, timestamp, and RSSI.
When a STA is not associated with the WLAN, APs near the STA receive Probe Request frames sent by the STA to obtain STA information such as the MAC address, time stamp, and RSSI.
When the STA is associated with the WLAN, surrounding APs obtain data required for customer flow analysis from management frames and data frames sent by the STA.
The APs send the collected information to the AC.
The AC directly sends the received data to the customer flow analysis server without parsing the data.
The customer flow analysis server parses the STA's information such as the MAC address, timestamp, and RSSI. According to the analysis of the customer's moving tracks and other information such as the longest duration in a shop, the shopping mall can know the customer's consumption habits and occupation. Graphical information will then be displayed to instruct the shopping mall to push customized advertisements to customers.