What is a BLE Beacon?
A BLE Beacon is a hardware including a MCU, a BLE radio, an antenna and a power source. Things like Freescale Beacon, iBeacon, AltBeacon or Eddystone are software protocols with their own characteristics.
How it works?
A BLE Beacon is a non-connectable device that uses Bluetooth Low Energy (BLE or Bluetooth Smart) to broadcast packets that include identifying information and each packet receives the name of Advertising Packet.
The packet structure and the information broadcasted by a Beacon depend on the protocol, but, the basic structure is conformed by:
Example
UUID | Major | Minor |
|
AAAAAAAA-AAAA-AAAA-AAAA-AAAAAAAAAAAA | 1 | 1 | These Beacons share the same UUID and Major number, and are differentiated by Minor number. |
AAAAAAAA-AAAA-AAAA-AAAA-AAAAAAAAAAAA | 1 | 2 | |
AAAAAAAA-AAAA-AAAA-AAAA-AAAAAAAAAAAA | 2 | 1 | This Beacon shares the same UUID as the previous ones, but has a different Major number, so it belongs to a different group. |
BBBBBBBB-BBBB-BBBB-BBBB-BBBBBBBBBBBB | 1 | 1 | This Beacon is completely different from the previous ones, since it doesn’t share the same UUID. |
These packets need to be translated or interpreted in order to provide the beacon a utility. There are applications that can interact with beacons, usually developed to be used with smartphones and/or tablets. These applications require being compliant with the protocol used by the beacon in order to be able to perform an action when a beacon is found.
Use Cases
Beacons can be used on different places to display different content or perform different actions, like:
Please write an article on security related problems with beacons.