Enabling Location Based Services in Data Centers Via Wireless USB Radios

Major data centers routinely sport several tens of thousands of "Assets" (servers, switches, storage bricks, etc.) that usually go into standard slots in a rack or a chassis that fits the rack. These assets may move around for a variety of reasons including replacement, SW patching, manual reorganization, etc. The ease with which assets can be inserted into or removed from the slots makes asset tracking a substantial problem in large data centers and some tracking solutions are beginning to emerge. Wireless LAN (WLAN) based localization has been extensively explored in the literature and can be implemented easily in software.