Nordic, who provide the System on a Chip (SoC) in many beacons, have released v2 of their Mesh SDK that implements standard Bluetooth Mesh.
The main improvements are around support for Bluetooth GATT. It’s now possible for devices such as commercial beacons or smartphones to participate in the mesh via the GATT Proxy mechanism. It’s also possible for devices such as smartphones to provision new devices via GATT through Provisioning Bearer GATT (PB_GATT) rather than via firmware API or the serial API. Unfortunately, there are currently no app examples so there’s a large learning curve and development mountain to overcome to implement products based on these mechanisms.
Martin Woolley, who works for the Bluetooth organisation as an evangelist, has new slides (PDF – needs login at Google for some reason) from a Bluetooth Mesh talk at DroidConIT. The slides explain many of the mesh concepts. Here’s the slide showing the GATT proxy mechanism:
The documentation for Mesh v2 is on the Nordic web site.