Stress-Testing 100 Bluetooth Beacons (So the Team Can Sleep Well at Night)

Summary

How do we make sure our system works with hundreds of devices in the same room? We test it with hundreds of devices in the same room. Over the past year, I have been working with Blecon, a startup based in Cambridge, UK, founded by the team behind the ARM Mbed OS, to make sure their new generation of Bluetooth beacons works reliably, even in the most challenging conditions. Blecon is developing a new generation of Bluetooth beacons that both send and receive data and that can handle large data payloads. The beacons use nearby smartphones, in addition to dedicated gateways, to send and receive data to and from the cloud. The beacons are designed to work in environments with many devices, such as warehouses, hospitals, and smart buildings. And it has to be reliable. Very reliable. So we built a testbed, with more than 100 devices, to make sure that the system works as expected. Here is how we did it. Bluetooth Beacons That Talk Back Blecon has created a new class of Bluetooth beacons that, unlike old school Bluetooth beacons, can both send and receive data, and can handle much larger data payloads. When a Blecon beacon is in the vicinity of a smartphone, that smartphone can forward data to and from the beacon. The data is encrypted and anonymized, so that the smartphone cannot read it. This makes it so that devices can communicate with the cloud, even when there are no dedicated gateways nearby. The smartphone needs to have a Blecon-enabled app. And that’s it. Once the app is installed, everything is handled automatically by the Blecon system. This is how it looks: The animation above shows how the system works: messages are sent to and from the beacons via the people carrying their smartphones. It is also possible to have dedicated gateway devices, called Hubs, in case there are no people around. (Feel free to click and drag around the people and the devices in the animation.) Why Bluetooth? Because Bluetooth is a one of the world’s most widely deployed wireless tech...