Bluetooth Mesh has arrived. Just like the extended set of 802.11 or 802.11b was approved in 1999 Wi-Fi as we coin the word, came to of age. Wi-Fi has evolved rapidly in the past seventeen years. Fortunately, Integra Systems was there at the beginning of this wave of innovation. Actually, Wi-Fi, the short word for the Wi-Fi Alliance; came about a year later. http://www.wi-fi.org
Most technology disruptions start first with the consumer; as this then tends to drive innovation in the enterprise space. If we look at Bluetooth this is pretty much the case. Both Wi-Fi and Bluetooth operate in the 2.4GHz space, but initially DSSS (Direct Sequence Spread Spectrum) was used for Wi-Fi, and FHSS (Frequency Hopping Spread Spectrum) for Bluetooth, but that has evolved to OFDM (Orthogonal Frequency Division Multiplexing) for Wi-Fi.
Bluetooth started out with the simple point-point to consumer need of a connection of keyboard or mouse to the laptop (2.0). Now every smart phone has Bluetooth (4.0) that can also connect to the car, thus meaning we do not have to wear headsets if we do not want to. Everybody has a smart phone today…well almost everybody. All WLAN silicon offerings have BTLE on board.
Now Bluetooth has been designed into several companies WLAN and controller offerings. This is the convergence of the PAN (Personal Area Network), with the WLAN to the enterprise space that has been realized.
2017 we now have Bluetooth Mesh. This is a game changer for the industrial automation space and location asset tracking space.
Some highlights:
Communications is peer-to-peer that allows all nodes
to communicate directly with one another.
Multi-Path and self-healing is provided for reliable message delivery.
Support will be up to 32,000 nodes per network.
The packet size is very small and combined with the high speed radio, messaging will be faster than the speed of sound.
Multicast messaging that often occurs in building automation solutions is addressed with managed flood relay architecture that is combined with a publish/subscribe to group messaging.
Network devices can be provided with security that uses 256-bit elliptic curve and out-of-band authentication. Communication is secured using AES-CCM with 128-bit keys.
Two layers of encryption and authentication are provided at the network and application layer.
www.bluetooth.com
