By Dr. Jacob Sharony, Mobius Consulting — June 2026
Knowing where things are has been a driving application of wireless technology for three decades — from warehouse RFID portals to BLE beacons in retail, to the UWB chip in your phone that finds your car keys. The field is now converging from two directions at once: consumer ranging is getting dramatically more precise (UWB, Bluetooth Channel Sounding), while battery-free tagging is entering the cellular standards themselves (ambient IoT in 3GPP). Having spent eight years leading R&D at Symbol Technologies / Motorola — where much of enterprise RFID and wireless asset tracking was pioneered — and holding more than ten U.S. patents in RF-based location and tracking, I find today’s landscape both familiar and remarkably new.
The Location Technology Landscape
- RFID and RTLS — passive UHF RFID (EPC Gen2 / ISO 18000-6C) remains the workhorse of inventory and supply-chain visibility: battery-free tags, ~10 m read range, reads by zone rather than coordinates. Active RTLS systems add real-time coordinates using RSSI, time-difference-of-arrival (TDOA), or angle-of-arrival (AoA) methods.
- BLE beacons and Bluetooth ranging — beacons (iBeacon, Eddystone) brought cheap proximity awareness to retail, venues, and logistics. The bigger step is Bluetooth Channel Sounding, introduced in Bluetooth 6.0 (2024): phase-based ranging that brings tens-of-centimeters accuracy and secure distance bounding to ordinary BLE devices — digital keys, finders, and access control without a dedicated radio.
- UWB — time-of-flight ranging with ~10–30 cm accuracy, standardized in IEEE 802.15.4z and deployed at scale (Apple AirTag and U-series chips, the Car Connectivity Consortium digital key, FiRa-certified RTLS). The next generation, IEEE 802.15.4ab, is expected to be published in 2026: narrowband-assisted ranging, roughly 4× range (up to ~100 m line-of-sight), lower energy, and standardized UWB radar/sensing — with first silicon already announced.
- Wi-Fi and cellular positioning — Wi-Fi fine timing measurement matured into IEEE 802.11az ranging; 5G NR has built in native positioning since Release 16, refined release by release for industrial use. Both reuse existing infrastructure rather than dedicated anchors.
- GNSS — still the outdoor baseline (~3–5 m), increasingly fused with the above indoors.
Comparing the Technologies
| Technology | Typical accuracy | Range | Tag power | Typical uses |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Passive UHF RFID | Zone / presence | ~10 m | Battery-free | Inventory, supply chain, retail |
| BLE beacon (RSSI) | ~1–5 m | ~10–50 m | Years on coin cell | Proximity, wayfinding, asset zones |
| Bluetooth Channel Sounding | Tens of cm | BLE range | Low | Digital keys, finders, access |
| UWB (802.15.4z / 4ab) | ~10–30 cm | ~10–100 m | Low–moderate | Item finding, digital key, precision RTLS |
| Wi-Fi (802.11az) | ~1 m class | AP coverage | Client device | Indoor positioning on existing WLAN |
| 5G NR positioning | Meters (improving) | Wide area | Device | Industrial, logistics, public safety |
| GNSS | ~3–5 m | Global, outdoor | Receiver | Fleet, outdoor tracking |
Ambient IoT: RFID Principles Enter the Cellular Standard
The most consequential development is ambient IoT — devices that harvest energy from radio waves or their environment and communicate by backscatter or ultra-low-power transmission, eliminating batteries entirely. Conceptually this is the RFID idea, but standardized into the cellular ecosystem: 3GPP’s Release 19 delivered the first ambient IoT specification (passive devices in indoor topologies, with the base station acting as the reader), and Release 20 normative work is now under way to extend it to outdoor scenarios, active device classes, and topologies where a phone or device acts as the reader. The target is a scale RFID never reached — networked, battery-free tags on practically everything, managed through the same networks that carry 5G traffic — and it is also one of the usage directions flagged for 6G.
A Litigation Perspective
Location and tracking technologies have generated steady patent litigation for two decades, and the new wave is building:
- Beacon patents have already been litigated at scale. BLE beacon location patents were asserted broadly in recent years — I served as an expert in BillJCo v. Cisco Systems (E.D. Tex.) and BillJCo v. Apple (W.D. Tex.), among the prominent beacon campaigns.
- Asset tracking is ITC territory. Tag/reader and logistics-tracking disputes regularly reach the ITC and district courts — I testified in Zebra Technologies v. OnAsset Intelligence (ITC Inv. No. 337-TA-1278) and Intellectual Ventures II v. FedEx (E.D. Tex., jury trial).
- The method of localization is often the claim battleground. Whether an accused system localizes by RSSI, TDOA, AoA, time-of-flight, or fingerprinting — and where the computation happens (tag, reader, server) — frequently decides infringement. These distinctions trace back to patents from the early 2000s, including work my colleagues and I patented at Symbol Technologies, which now serves as prior art defining the state of the art of that era.
- UWB and Channel Sounding are the next wave. Item finders, digital car keys, and precision RTLS sit on dense patent portfolios mapped to FiRa, CCC, Bluetooth SIG, and IEEE 802.15.4 specifications — classic standards-mapping disputes in the making. And the ambient IoT specifications being written in Release 20 are creating the SEP landscape that will be litigated in the 2030s.
For related expert witness services, see RFID / NFC / RTLS Patent Expert Witness, Bluetooth / BLE Patent Expert Witness, IPR / PTAB Wireless Patent Expert Witness, and previous testimony and engagements, or contact Mobius Consulting.