The Bluetooth Technology Alliance officially announced on July 19th that Bluetooth ®) The technology has begun to fully support Mesh mesh networks. This means that Bluetooth Mesh mesh networks have finally become practical. Bluetooth mesh extends low-power Bluetooth wireless connectivity to consumer products, smart homes, and multi node applications in industrial IoT applications. More Bluetooth solutions and modules that support Mesh networking are currently being closely designed and developed.

Mesh network is an ideal solution for various applications, such as large-scale enterprise lighting facilities. Through Bluetooth mesh, users can immediately and simultaneously control up to hundreds of low-power Bluetooth lighting fixtures using a single Bluetooth 4.0 (or later) smartphone and tablet. Other major Bluetooth mesh applications include backend devices for beacons and industrial monitoring.

Mesh network can provide many to many device transmission and improve the communication efficiency of building a large-scale device network. Compared to the point-to-point (P2P) transmission of Bluetooth and the communication network composed of two single nodes in series, Mesh network treats each device as a single node in the network, allowing all nodes to connect to each other, expanding the transmission range and scale, and enabling various devices to communicate with each other.

Simply put, Mesh networks have the following four characteristics:

Self configuration: Connect to Ethernet and configure automatically.

Self management: If the system detects excessive usage of a frequency band, such as transitioning from 2.4G to 5G. Both wired and wireless can help connect to the optimal connection.

Self defense: Mesh networks also have good performance in resisting network intrusions and can resist various intrusion methods from hackers.

Self repair: Mesh has many different borrowing points. If a node fails, other nodes will share the workload of the bad node, which affects the operation of the rod-shaped network.

Compared to traditional communication technologies such as Zigbee, it has certain advantages

Firstly, the BLE Mesh module has low cost;

Secondly, the data packet loss rate and data transmission delay of the entire data network in BLE Mesh network are better than those in Zigbee network;

Thirdly, BLE is a wireless communication technology directly supported by smartphones. The lighting equipment using BLE Mesh technology can communicate directly with smartphones, and the mobile app application has more direct and flexible control over the lighting equipment. This is completely different from Zigbee systems being dragged down by gateways or similar gateway devices;

Fourthly, Mesh is an application of BLE broadcasting technology, and the application of LBS based on BLE broadcasting technology for building interior positioning, motion trajectory description, and navigation is the development direction of BLE Mesh technology application. This is completely incomparable to the Zigbee system.

According to a market study conducted by GSMA, the number of connected terminals per household in the United States has increased from 8 in 2012 to 24 in 2017, and is expected to increase to 50 in 2022. At present, although there are a large number of IoT devices, it is a highly complex and fragmented market. The devices in this market are not only produced by different manufacturers, but also have different networking methods (WiFi, Bluetooth, Zigbee, etc.), and even there are many ecosystems (such as Apple HomeKit, Weave, SmartThings, etc.). These differences have become a major obstacle in the development of the home IoT device industry.

With the advancement of technology and changes in demand, the evolution of various technologies is essential. Similarly, for Mesh technology, the problem of information silos in IoT devices cannot be solved overnight. Mesh networks are of great help in bridging the information silos between different IoT devices. In addition to the technical aspects of Mesh networking platforms, regulatory authorities also need to promote standardized technologies, I believe that driven by the huge market potential of the Internet of Things, various factors hindering its development will gradually be eliminated.