Bluetooth Low Energy now supports mesh networking

The Bluetooth Special Interest Group (SIG) announced today (18 July) that Bluetooth Low Energy (BLE) now supports mesh networking, enabling many-to-many device communications

It is optimised for large-scale device networks that occupy buildings or groups of buildings (e.g. university campuses) and is not being positioned as a technology for smart cities.

It will provide users with multi-path delivery with no single point of failure (enabled without any need for user intervention/set-up), reducing some of the issues associated with using licence-exempt technologies for business-critical processes. In addition, BLE uses multiple frequencies within the 2.4 GHz band, reducing the extent at which BLE networks can suffer from interference from other devices and giving BLE mesh networks greater scalability.

Martin Woolley, technical program manager at Bluetooth SIG, told Land Mobile that commercial lighting is likely to be one of the first use cases for the technology and that most smartphones on the market can interact with BLE mesh networks using software applications. BLE mesh networks have a latency of roughly 100 milliseconds for a six-hop journey, though it can be as low as 50 milliseconds.