Reality matters

Last week, Bluetooth SIG — the organization helping push forward the most popular wireless connectivity technology — announced Bluetooth Mesh, a completely new wireless communication standard built on top of their existing stack.

Bluetooth Mesh, a protocol that the industry has been working on for a couple of years, leverages the existing Bluetooth 4.x/5.0 Low Energy stack and associated advertising and GATT services to provide reliable and secure connectivity between hundreds or even thousands of BLE-enabled nodes.

We are extremely excited about the approved standard. It will open a new frontier of innovative real world applications that we have always pushed towards.

Our own implementation of low-power BLE mesh

In fact, we’ve been working on our own low-power BLE mesh implementation for a couple of years now. That’s because at Estimote, we’re in the business of building highly scalable location intelligence software, often running on thousands of wireless nodes. Deploying and maintaining these beacon networks at scale has to be time, labor, and cost-efficient.

We were never excited about gateways or other powered devices to sync with beacons. When deployed in thousands of locations, gateways massively impact ROI and introduce deployment complexity.

“Talk is cheap. Listening is expensive”

That’s why last year we released our own — and the world’s first — low-power BLE mesh implementation. With just a firmware update, it enabled our customers to group Estimote beacons into networks that can sync settings or even upgrade firmware from one beacon to another.

One of our engineers likes to say, “Beacons are similar to people: talk is cheap, but listening is expensive.” A Bluetooth device constantly advertising some data doesn’t experience much of a hit to battery life, but if it has to constantly “listen” by scanning the network so that it can accept and repeat messages, the battery drains much faster.

But for applications where we need to occasionally remotely update beacon settings, perform auto-mapping with UWB, collect sensor data or flash new firmware, high latency is not that important. In these cases, it’s acceptable if new settings take a minute or so to propagate within the entire beacon network.

New firmware with routed BLE mesh

What’s important for us is not only how intelligent a beacon network can be, but also how power efficient it is. That’s why we are pleased to introduce today another firmware update, which brings both intelligent routing and messages to our mesh architecture.

Initially, our low-power mesh network could only use a flooding protocol, meaning that every single device in the mesh network was involved in changing the settings. A change meant for just 2 devices placed close to each other needed to be processed by hundreds of devices in the network. Obviously, this caused huge losses of performance and energy. On top of that, each of those devices had the same settings as a result.

Addressing and mesh messages

Thanks to addressing, a single message can contain a piece of data dedicated for a particular device. Only the minimum number of required devices will consume the message using just a portion of their power. For Remote Fleet Management, this means energy saving and, just as importantly, that different configurations of a single setting can be used for different devices in the network. Constraints introduced by the first version of the low-power mesh network disappear.

Routed mesh

Our routing protocol allows you to send messages over a precisely defined and optimized path consisting of particular devices. Simple routing is not efficient enough from a power efficiency perspective, though. It lets you optimize the time of propagation, but a truly smart low-power network needs to go further — it should consider physical distance, the type of devices, their battery levels, and much more to properly balance the traffic. That is the reason we decided to take advantage of Estimote Cloud in calculating the optimal routing tables.

Our commitment to implement standardized mesh

Both addressing and routing are exactly these kinds of improvements, ones that you don’t need to think about. In practice, it means you can now define settings for each device independently. They will be applied to your network with a single message propagated over selected devices. In the future it will enable us to introduce much more advanced interactions.

Since Bluetooth SIG Mesh standard is official now and vendors like Nordic have already published new soft-devices for their chips, we are committing to implement a “friend mode” feature of the standardized mesh, to ensure our beacons will be compatible with other Bluetooth SIG mesh devices. Our nodes will continue to use our low-power implementation, to guarantee the highest possible power efficiency.

Get started with BLE mesh using beacons today

You can try the routed low-power mesh right away, just follow the tutorial we’ve prepared, and you’ll be able to make a blinking beacon matrix as above in minutes.

To use these new mesh capabilities, just update your beacons to firmware 4.13.0 (or later). To test straight away go to Cloud, set two different majors for two beacons in the same mesh, and connect to just one of the meshed beacons. You will see data propagating very quickly, and you’ll be able to see that both have that new major applied. If your devices are already in a mesh, you need to update just one device and the others will update automatically.

Marcin Klimek, Product Manager at Estimote

Rafał Ociepa, Community Manager at Estimote