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bluetoothbluetooth-lowenergy
Sam McCauley
Sam McCauley

Reputation: 11

How exactly does the new Bluetooth Mesh network handle provisioning?

I have read in a couple of places (but nowhere official) that you need to use a smartphone to setup and add devices to a mesh. Is that true? Can you not do it with IR or a NFC? What are my options?

Upvotes: 1

Views: 1853

Answers (3)

Bogdan Alexandru
Bogdan Alexandru

Reputation: 5542

Bluetooth Mesh defines the Provisioner as the device that is able to create a mesh network and add (provision) new nodes into the network.

A Provisioner does not necessarily have to be a smartphone, although that will generally be the case. Provisioning is performed over Bluetooth channels - either over advertising channels (using a new protocol defined by Bluetooth Mesh), or over GATT (to support legacy smartphones that cannot advertise custom AD types).

To provision nodes over the advertising channels (the so-called PB-ADV bearer), the smartphone OS needs to be updated to allow developers to implement the PB-ADV protocol. That is not likely to happen soon enough.

Therefore the best option will be to provision nodes over GATT. The unprovisioned node (e.g., the sensor) will have to include the Mesh Provisioning Service in its GATT Database. The smartphone (as GATT Client) will connect and discover this service, and use its characteristics to exchange Mesh Provisioning PDUs.

You can wait until some companies will develop these smartphone apps, or, if you are in a hurry, you can grab the Mesh specification available on the Bluetooth website and develop a provisioning app yourself. The current smartphones' OS allows you to develop a GATT Provisioner (both on Android and iOS).

Upvotes: 4

Simon Judge
Simon Judge

Reputation: 302

At the moment, the best place to start is the Nordic Mesh SDK that uses the Bluetooth SIG mesh. This has an example (for lighting) where a Bluetooth device itself does the provisioning. There's also a 'Serial' example where, again, a Bluetooth device does the provisioning connected via UART to USB that can be controlled via a desktop/laptop. You could extend the examples so that the provisioning BT device has extra GATT services that open up the provisioning to smartphones.

Upvotes: 0

KOgami
KOgami

Reputation: 1

In general, a phone/tablet class device is needed for provisioning. IR or NFC can be used for OOB authentication, but the full Bluetooth mesh stack is required to initiate and complete the provisioning process. A good reference as an introduction to Bluetooth mesh can be downloaded from the bluetooth.com web site Bluetooth mesh Introduction for Developers.

Upvotes: 0

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