Category: Mesh

Bluetooth SIG Mesh Rationale

If you take a look at the recently announced Bluetooth SIG mesh, it’s described by three specifications with around 1000 pages! It took three years to create. So what’s the rationale that caused it to be so complex?

For some answers, take a look at Szymon Slupik’s personal blog. Szymon is the Chair Mesh Working Group at Bluetooth SIG and his posts give a fascinating insight into the thinking behind the Bluetooth SIG mesh.

Start with the post on Bluetooth Mesh – The Launch and then read about The Packet, Depth, Flexibility and Scalability.

You can also follow Szymon on Twitter.

Read more about Bluetooth mesh on our web site.

Bluetooth Mesh and Battery Use

There’s a new article at Nordic Semiconductor blog, By Alf Helge Omre, on Bluetooth Mesh in lighting: What comes next?

Alf explains how lighting is the perfect conduit because it’s everywhere and is also mains powered. The mesh can be used to control the lights as well as provide for IoT sensing.

The main example in the Nordic Mesh SDK is a light control demo which reinforces how important Nordic think lighting will be for mesh. The ‘mains powered’ mention is also important. The introduction to the Bluetooth Mesh SDK says:

“The Bluetooth Mesh requires a higher power consumption than traditional Bluetooth low energy applications, and unlike Bluetooth low energy Advertiser devices, active mesh devices cannot be run off coin-cell batteries for extended periods of time.”

Also, despite all the hype over Bluetooth mesh, TI (the other main SoC provider) don’t have an SDK yet and the Nordic SDK is still alpha:

“This is an experimental release for exploration of the BLE Mesh stack on the nRF5 device family. It is not intended for commercial use”

We have been playing with the Nordic mesh examples and while they work on Nordic’s developer kit hardware we have had ‘alpha’ difficulties getting the mesh working on real beacons. One observation is that the Bluetooth mesh needs more capable SoCs than are found in the majority of our beacons. As previously mentioned, battery life is a concern so USB beacons tend to be the best candidates. Another customer insight is that while it might seem convenient to put sensors into lights, most industrial uses require sensors to be much closer to what’s being sensed. In practice, they will probably not be part of the active mesh and instead sensor beacons will use the friendship feature. We will be providing Bluetooth mesh beacons once the SDK is release quality.

We have also been playing with FruityMesh that’s better suited to battery use and also works on lower spec SoCs. We already have it working on some of our beacons. We have been told by M-Way Solutions that FruityMesh is currently going through a large software update. Once this is completed, we hope to start providing FruityMesh beacons.

Read more about Bluetooth mesh on our web site.

The State of IoT (and Beacons)

There’s an interesting new video by Mr Beacon on the state of IoT. It’s an interview with ex-Intel Aidoo Osei with insights on the business side of IoT.

Aidoo talks of IoT being a technology searching for a meaningful problem people are willing to pay to solve. The important part is ‘pay’, as many initiatives such as smart cities require a thorough understanding of how these things might be financed. Also, for many IoT technology providers, there’s a tension between providing open, inter-operable systems and wanting to own the stack.

Aidoo provides an upbeat view of beacons. He thinks beacons are simple at the moment because phones/apps are more capable. As beacons become more used as components of IoT systems, there’s an opportunity for them to be more complex.

While Aidoo didn’t mention this, one example of beacons becoming more complex is the use of mesh networking.

Bluetooth Mesh Solution Choices

Although much of the Beacon related PR at the moment is centred around the availability of the Bluetooth SIG Mesh there are other mesh solutions some of which were referenced in our previous post.

Two other mesh solutions that are catching our eye at the moment are Wirepas and Fruitymesh because they provide more at the application level.

Wirepas provides for remote monitoring and configuration of beacons allowing you to set things such as advertisement interval, transmit power, used channels and the beacon payload. It also allows monitoring of beacon battery levels and firmware update. The mesh supports enhanced beacon security to protect against beacon spoofing and piggybacking.

Fruitymesh is open source software provided by M-Way Solutions GmbH in Germany. It allows you to configure beacon advertising, set up Bluetooth scanning, perform I/O and report beacon status, all via the mesh.

What sets these two solutions apart from the Bluetooth SIG mesh is that they are more optimised for use on battery powered devices.

We hope to be supplying beacons with Bluetooth SIG mesh, Wirepas and Fruitymesh in the near future as no one solution is suitable for all scenarios.

Read more about Bluetooth mesh on our web site.

Bluetooth Mesh Design and Implementation

Ericsson, who actively participated in the definition of the architecture and the development of the mesh profile specification, have a new article on Bluetooth mesh networking.

The article explains how the mesh network was designed and architected to provide for reliable throughput when there’s a large number of nodes. They also talk about a building automation usecase that they created to test the implementation.

Read more about Bluetooth mesh on our web site.

Nordic Beacons and the Bluetooth SIG Mesh

The same day we posted about the research paper on Bluetooth Mesh networks, the Bluetooth SIG happened to announce the public availability of their Bluetooth Mesh.

There are lots of marketing articles saying what will be possible and at the other end of the scale, mesh networking specifications that explain how it works. However, to implement these things, we need something in between marketing and specs that works with real hardware.

Today, there’s a new article on the Nordic InfoCenter blog that explains, in simpler terms, how the Bluetooth mesh works and introduces the Nordic SDK.

As we mentioned in our previous article, Bluetooth LE mesh networks tend to leave the application layer to the developer. This is so that mesh network can be used in many scenarios in many vertical industries. However, what’s particularly interesting with the Nordic SDK is that they have implemented some of the application level:

For beacons:

“We have therefore created a Beacon API as part of the Mesh SDK to do concurrent Beaconing and mesh networking”

Taking a look at the part of the SDK for beacons, there’s an API to define the device as a beacon with an advertising payload and advertising interval. The payload is up to the developer. While this falls short of defining APIs for the iBeacon and Eddystone beacon types, it provides a baseline for manufacturers and 3rd party solution providers such as ourselves to create new beacon products and solutions.

A Survey of Bluetooth Low Energy Mesh Networks

There’s a new research paper by Seyed Mahdi Darroudi and Carles Gomez of Department of Network Engineering, Universitat Politècnica de Catalunya, Castelldefels 08860, Spain on Bluetooth Low Energy Mesh Networks: A Survey (pdf).

It gives a consolidated view of mesh Bluetooth LE networks. It explains how Bluetooth LE was originally designed for a star network topology with limited range. While Bluetooth 5 increases the range, there are still scenarios that require longer range which can be solved by networking devices into a mesh. The paper covers current standard, academic and proprietary mesh networks and discusses the merits of flooding-based vs routing-based solutions.

One omission is FruityMesh that isn’t discussed in the paper. Another omission is discussion of battery/power use. One of the main features of Bluetooth LE is low power. This comes about because devices only transmit for about 1ms every period, where a period is typically 100ms to 1s. Once devices have to talk to each other, the transmission time goes up with a consequent increase of battery power. In practice, battery driven mesh networks end up having high latency and/or very low data throughput in order to conserve power.

Another consideration is what goes on top of Bluetooth LE mesh networks. The application layer is often left to the developer. For example, facilities to manage meshes of iBeacon/Eddystone beacons don’t exist. The application level ends up being proprietary and complex.