Have you ever heard of Bluetooth® Smart? It’s the latest addition to the Bluetooth Specification and it uses Bluetooth low energy technology to enable the Internet of Things (IoT) for products that operate on small coin cells for years. How is that possible you may ask? Bluetooth low energy was designed to be low power, only waking up from time to time to transmit small amounts of data with rather high latency in a range that covers up to a couple of meters. Perfect for sensors! That’s how it began in 2010.
It took a year or two until the first products showed up on the market in the form of heart rate belts and smart watches. Then a smartphone came into the picture, Apple iPhone 4S. It was the first phone on the market to support Bluetooth low energy and the market took off. The fact that everyone carrying a smartphone, could connect to all kinds of products in a low power manner was something new. Suddenly, everyone wanted their product to be connected to a smartphone.
As a natural progression came the talk about Internet of Things and cloud connectivity so your smartphone can connect to any-thing and so allowing any-thing to connect to the Internet (read cloud). With this dramatic change, firmware updates could be pushed to products out in the field, smartphones could control helicopter toys and wireless add-ons can replace wires in weird places.
We are at this point closing in on 2015 and all of a sudden, manufacturers are now using Bluetooth Smart (which is becoming the more common name for Bluetooth low energy) for longer-range communication, high throughput transfers and tough ISM applications as well. This is not at all what Bluetooth low energy was designed for. However, Bluetooth low energy is now advancing into high quality industrial applications; replacing whatever has been used for ages, or at least a very long time.
It’s time for a revolution, time for Bluetooth Smart to show its worth in new places. Bluetooth Smart is emerging into unexplored new market segments from hardcore industrial applications and fancy home appliances to trendy beaco-systems [sic].
There are already deployed solutions for use cases including both wired and wireless technologies that can be replaced by Bluetooth Smart. As Bluetooth Smart is evolving and adapting to these new use cases, one might be afraid that there might be a “war” between standards coming. I like to think about it more of an evolution, where the survival of the fittest applies. The future will behold which technology is suitable for what.
However, we can already elaborate on some applications that might be impacted. Take lighting as an example, where ZigBee is dominating the marked with smart bulbs connected in a network to a Wi-Fi gateway. Bluetooth Smart can do star topologies as of now, with a central or smartphone controlling multiple light bulbs. However, ZigBee operates in a mesh network topology which means that information can be routed through nodes and range can be extended beyond the gateway limitation. Bluetooth Mesh is something that could address this in the future as well, if it’s designed in an energy efficient way (i.e. not using flooding etc.) and the security is robust including the complete solution for that matter. But what about the already deployed ZigBee solutions, will those be redundant? Well, not necessarily. What if one node in the ZigBee network adds Bluetooth Smart? Or the gateway includes a Bluetooth Smart interface.
There are other use cases; i.e. Machine to Machine (M2M), cable replacements, asset tracking and automation control that can benefit from Bluetooth Smart in the industrial setting. There are already multiple connectivity technologies with a foothold in the industrial space including Ethernet, ZigBee, Wi-Fi, Sub-1 GHz etc. and Bluetooth Smart can easily complement these technologies. What is needed is a focus on streamlining a set of technologies to define a wireless super-set similar to the useful Swiss army knife.
Why is Bluetooth Smart a good fit for industrial applications? Read the 6-part blog series on ECN Magazine that covers the industrial applications mentioned above and allow me to enlighten you.
- Why Bluetooth Smart is perfect for M2M
- Connecting machinery to the IoT
- How to use Bluetooth Smart in industrial lighting
- How you can replace wires with Bluetooth Smart
- Why Beacon is the next big thing in wireless
- The key to using Bluetooth Smart in asset tracking