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Mesh Networking Comes To Bluetooth, Which Could Set Off a New Wave of Smart Buildings (geekwire.com)
One of the most widely used technologies in mobile computing is getting an important upgrade that could accelerate the development of the smart home and industrial internet. From a report: The Bluetooth Special Interest Group, the Kirkland, Wash.-based group that enforces compatibility among the billions of devices that use the short-range Bluetooth wireless technology, plans to announce Tuesday that the standard now supports mesh networking. Mesh networks connect a variety of access points and devices across a distributed network, rather than the one-to-one connection that currently exists between your smartphone and that headset that makes you look ridiculous. This approach dramatically improves the range and reliability of a wireless network, since information can be relayed across several different devices rather than having to stretch between two far-apart devices. And if part of the network goes offline, mesh technology has the capability to route around that outage and still carry out its original mission. Wi-Fi networks have also been getting in on this mesh networking act, which has an additional bonus: mesh networks are much easier to set up than traditional wireless networks.
Billions of unprotectable devices now connected?
What could possibly go wrong?
New axiom: Any mention of a cool new technology will be accompanied by a prediction of "Smart Buildings" where all the magic is built into the drywall...
Just because I can hook a shark from a boat, I do no offer to wrestle it in the water.
:(
The password will always be '1234'.
Mesh Networking Comes To Bluetooth, Which Will Set Off a New Wave of Botnets
the preceding comment is my own and in no way reflects the opinion of the Joint Chiefs of Staff
I think I may go with hard to set up local network for anything where financial data etc is. For entertainment, a mesh could be great. This is a reminder that you should be careful selecting your smart home software. http://garyjohnsoninfo.info/mu.... There are so many issues with smart houses. Lock in to a specific vendor, security, obsolescence . For example see https://msdn.microsoft.com/en-... excerpt "LIMITATION ON REMEDIES; NO CONSEQUENTIAL OR OTHER DAMAGES. Your exclusive remedy for any breach of this Limited Warranty is as set forth below. Except for any refund elected by Microsoft, YOU ARE NOT ENTITLED TO ANY DAMAGES, INCLUDING BUT NOT LIMITED TO CONSEQUENTIAL DAMAGES, if the Software does not meet Microsoft's Limited Warranty, and, to the maximum extent allowed by applicable law, even if any remedy fails of its essential purpose."
Mesh networking seems to run counter to the trend towards very low power when you simultaneously need a sophisticated routing algorithm to keep your mesh up and forwarding traffic.
So what happened to Z-wave and ZigBee? They "route around" and are mesh too.
" Which WOULD Set Off a New Wave of massive, realtime creeping surveillance. "
And we all know how well the IOT is managed, this is going to be an awesome apocalypse!
When I worked at Cisco in 2013, we were testing IP phones on the wireless network. One neat feature was to start a call on the fourth floor, take the elevator down, and go out into the parking lot without ever losing the connection. Never mind that a half-dozen access points seamlessly handled the call, including one AP inside the elevator and an AP in the parking lot.
is fucked.
mesh or hardwired AP's to the same network? did they have something unifi controller in the back end?
Hark, a shiny! Let us use it to jam 2.4GHz ISM band to the point that it's completely unusable!
In all seriousness, unlicensed spectrum needs some.. help. I know it doesn't make any money for anyone directly, but still... ISM gets a whopping ~380 MHz of bandwidth in bands under 10GHz, 350 of which is in 2.4/5.8GHz. All the acronyms (FHSS, etc.) in the world can't save you from the fact that everyone else is already using the band.
There is no XUL, only WebExtensions...
Never mind worrying about so-called, over-hyped, mostly fake 'AI' nonsense 'taking over the world', or 'robots shooting us dead in the streets', or whatever the hell it was that Musk was on about yesterday, what we really need to worry about is so-called 'smart buildings', absolutely saturated with poorly designed and poorly secured 'IoT' nonsense getting hacked into, turning whole buildings against their occupants. It'll be the new 'ransomware': 'Pay us X amount of bitcoins, or we don't allow the building to let people leave/breathe/out of the elevators/(insert whatever mischief they can accomplish, here)'.
AI is just 5 years out for the 50 years
Fusion is just 10 years away for the past 60 years
Cure for cancer...
Travel to Mars...
The real problem with IoT is that nobody is willing to share data and cooperate so it is all just a bundle of orphaned plastic junk the connects with nothing (sound and fury signifying nothing). Where is the I in IoT? Until I can ping my door bell from any connected terminal there is no Internet in the Internet of Things.
This is not the first attempt at Bluetooth mesh networking, I'm curious if they managed to solve the problems that made scatternets unviable. They need to get their tech a LOT better, because they may have a niche in point to point communication, but once they move into networking they will have to compete with ad hoc wifi, which already works pretty well.
I for one look forward to no longer having issues pairing 1-1 with a device.
Not sure if issues pairing with multiple devices at once will be an improvement, but at least I won't have issues pairing 1-1 anymore.
It's not completely clear to me from TLA whether this builds on BLE (Bluetooth Low Energy a.k.a. Bluetooth Smart), though the reference to the 4.0 level of the standard, the many instances of the word "Smart" in the article, that it's a mesh, and the nature of the protocols all suggest it's BLE.
If so, it will be interesting to see how they keep it from eating up the devices' batteries. BLE devices get a couple years out of a coin cell by spending about 99.5% of their time "asleep", drawing roughly three orders of magnitude less current (~5 uA rather than ~5 mA) than when awake and with the radio on. Typically only a clock using a watch crystal is running during that time.
(Yes, that 99.5% isn't rhetoric. An advertisement takes about 5 ms, so a configuration of one advert per sec comes out to a duty cycle of about 1/200.)
They get away with that because they have a distinction between centrals (which have line power or (like smartphones) big batteries with frequent recharging) and peripherals (little battery powered devices that must only sip electrons). Peripherals can transmit when they feel like it. But centrals have to spend a lot of time listening, and the receiver (which has a lot to do) is (counterintuitively) slightly more power hungry than the transmitter.
If you try to build a mesh network out of what were formerly peripherals, not only do they have to spend several times as much battery power forwarding other devices' messages than they do handing their own (if everybody is equally chatty), but if the scheduling isn't set up right (or while listening for new players) they may need to leave the receiver on for substantial periods listening to the crickets chirp. That would just KILL battery life.
So I await the opportunity to peruse this addition to the spec. with bated breath.
(But not held breath. Even without this, the BLE v4.1 standard was 2,841 pages of some of the crummiest prose I've had the misfortune to have to try to understand. And I may be the only person to successfully implement a T1/T2/T3 framer from just the Bell standards and a logic analyzer bitstream capture.)
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way
have you tried transferring data between two bluetooth version 4 devices recently?
bandwidth is running at 24mbps now, typically faster than wifi through a router. very pleased to have 100MB videos transfer to my laptop from the phone in just a few seconds. long gone are the version 2 3mbps days.
if not.
buy new stuff cheapscate.
As noted in summary, we already have it in WiFi. WiFi mesh networking did not bring a revolution of usages, why would it be the case with Bluetooth mesh networking?
assuming you are referring to the "AI" being touted by the likes of google and facebook then i absolutely agree.
But the AI that is replacing jobs and started the latest "craze" is not accessible/available to your average developer, its too valuable at the moment. And certainly isnt appearing in any how to blogs by people seeking work in the field.
Even IBMs Watson is outdated now.