Bluetooth SIG Mesh Networking Aimed at IoT Gets Qualcomm Support, Analyst Optimism
Bluetooth’s new mesh capability enables many-to-many device communications and is optimized for large-scale device networks, the Bluetooth Special Interest Group announced Tuesday: It's suited for building automation, sensor networks and other IoT solutions where “tens, hundreds, or thousands of devices…
Sign up for a free preview to unlock the rest of this article
Communications Daily is required reading for senior executives at top telecom corporations, law firms, lobbying organizations, associations and government agencies (including the FCC). Join them today!
need to reliably and securely communicate with one another,” the group said. This is a “critical enabler” of Bluetooth’s transition from a personal area network and pairing technology to a “more scalable, robust, low-power IoT connectivity solution,” ABI Research analyst Andrew Zignani emailed in a blast Tuesday. Mesh networking opens opportunities where competing wireless connectivity technologies like ZigBee gained traction, Zignani told us. “Monitoring multiple sensors on machinery and relaying this back to a central system for predictive maintenance could be a potential use case.” Announcing support for the Bluetooth standard, Qualcomm expects to support Bluetooth mesh on all of the company’s future generations of Bluetooth LE products. Others announcing support: Toshiba and Silicon Labs (here and here).