Bluetooth is a wireless technology open standard, used in telecommunications and born to create personal area networks (PANs): BLE devices such as smartphone, tablet, palmtop and sensor wearable can establish a connection and exchange data.
The biggest advantage of this technology comes from the open standard, which allows open solutions, with small power consumption, not expensive production costs and contained area coverage (from 1 m up to 100 m and beyond).
Thanks to its features, Bluetooth is spreading beyond consumer applications, being used also in the Industrial scenarios to communicate with datalogger, sensors and other IoT (Internet of Things) and M2M (Machine to Machine) typical tools.
From the release 4.0 and on, Bluetooth is referred as BLE (Bluetooth Low Energy). If a simple data broadcast needs to take place, there is no need of a proper connection and users don’t have to worry about turning off Bluetooth once data has been exchanged.
Is better instead, leave it active in order to receive notifications or see “services” exposed from other BLE devices around (i.e. retail applications): beacon Tag BLE – called iBeacon in Apple standard.
This is the biggest potentiality of BLE: nowadays almost every smartphone and tablet are BLE compliant and can receive automatically notifications and messages from the other BLE devices and sensors around without any voluntary action (Wireless Sensor Network).
Bluetooth Low Energy was born with a light and user-friendly oriented architecture: smartphone becomes receiver and can detect small data packets coming from BLE tags scattered around, generating so notification by an App installed on it.
The App development is encouraged from the big presence of BLE devices and also from the open libraries available from BLE producers.
According to ABI Research results, we expect to have more than 30 billions of BLE devices connected within 2020!
