Whitepaper
Supercharging Beacons with Bluetooth 5
Bluetooth? Low Energy (BLE) beacons have been deployed in the market for several years now and have become a leading technology choice for proximity-aware applications. The low power and simplicity of BLE,? coupled with its ubiquitous use in smartphones, make low-cost, battery-powered beacons achievable and enable the broad adoption of beacons for location-based services embedded in smartphone apps.
Until now, BLE beacons relied on the structure of advertising packets originally defined in Bluetooth v4.0,? stuffing beacon content into a limited 31-byte payload. Bluetooth 5 introduced several major enhancements for BLE, including new PHY layers and Advertising Extensions. These enhancements add significantly more functionality?and flexibility to the advertising mechanisms, including a much larger advertising packet capacity.
In this paper, we lightly review beacon basics and then discuss these new Bluetooth 5 features and how they enable second-generation beacons with fuller, richer content.
Whitepaper
Supercharging Beacons with Bluetooth 5
Bluetooth? Low Energy (BLE) beacons have been deployed in the market for several years now and have become a leading technology choice for proximity-aware applications. The low power and simplicity of BLE,? coupled with its ubiquitous use in smartphones, make low-cost, battery-powered beacons achievable and enable the broad adoption of beacons for location-based services embedded in smartphone apps.
Until now, BLE beacons relied on the structure of advertising packets originally defined in Bluetooth v4.0,? stuffing beacon content into a limited 31-byte payload. Bluetooth 5 introduced several major enhancements for BLE, including new PHY layers and Advertising Extensions. These enhancements add significantly more functionality?and flexibility to the advertising mechanisms, including a much larger advertising packet capacity.
In this paper, we lightly review beacon basics and then discuss these new Bluetooth 5 features and how they enable second-generation beacons with fuller, richer content.