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Network Communications Networking The Internet

Mesh Networking Comes To Bluetooth, Which Could Set Off a New Wave of Smart Buildings (geekwire.com) 70

Posted by msmash from the breakthroughs dept.
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.
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Mesh Networking Comes To Bluetooth, Which Could Set Off a New Wave of Smart Buildings More

Mesh Networking Comes To Bluetooth, Which Could Set Off a New Wave of Smart Buildings

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  • Obligatory (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward

    Billions of unprotectable devices now connected?

    What could possibly go wrong?

    • What could possibly go wrong?

      With their dollars in hand, the people will fund this creation.

      • Well, they will until the security incidents get ugly enough.

        • Re: (Score:2)

          by gnick ( 1211984 )

          Only if the security incidents affect them directly. If the incident is somebody using the network for a DDoS, the owners likely won't notice or care.

  • 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...

  • I look ridiculous? (Score:3)

    by glenebob ( 414078 ) on Tuesday July 18, 2017 @01:52PM (#54834351)

    :(

  • How secure will it be? (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward

    The password will always be '1234'.

  • TFTFY (Score:4, Insightful)

    by Thud457 ( 234763 ) on Tuesday July 18, 2017 @01:54PM (#54834367) Homepage Journal

    Mesh Networking Comes To Bluetooth, Which Will Set Off a New Wave of Botnets

  • 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... [garyjohnsoninfo.info]. There are so many issues with smart houses. Lock in to a specific vendor, security, obsolescence . For example see https://msdn.microsoft.com/en-... [microsoft.com] excerpt "LIMITATION ON REMEDIES; NO CONSEQUENTIAL OR OTHER DAMAGES. Your exclusive remedy for any breach

    • I think I may go with hard to set up local network for anything where financial data etc is.

      I had CAT5e in my previous house. I moved 4 years ago and before I moved in I ran CAT6 to the rooms I knew I would have computers in them. All of my servers and desktops are on copper. My firewall blocks traffic between the copper and the port to the WiFi router. The only thing that the WiFi connects to is the internet. Phones, tablets and computers that are not on copper are the only things that connect to the WiFi.

      • Am I missing something ? How do you computers that are on copper {hard wired, not wireless} connect to the internet?

        • Re: (Score:2)

          by suutar ( 1860506 )

          sounds like his home net has two subnets, copper and wifi; everything can reach the internet through the firewall but wifi and copper can't talk to each other. I have a similar setup but I don't prevent wifi from reaching copper because that's where the fileserver and the printer are.

  • 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.

    • Yes, this is what I'm working on now. Mesh complicates routing which complicates battery life. But often you need the mesh just to avoid the necessary canopy of other wrieless devices to talk to. Ie, Zigbee devices assume that they can talk to your electric meter, so they're leaf nodes in that sense, but the electric meters will be considered the canopy (they're meshed, using PLC, cellular, etc).

      Most consumer things are pretty dumb about power and require periodic recharing of batteries. Sensor networks th

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by swb ( 14022 )

        And not only will you have the CPU overhead of a routing protocol to manage the mesh, now you also need a security structure to handle joining the mesh, validating routing updates, validating the inevitable certificate hierarchy involve in securing everything and so on.

  • ZigBee & Z-Wave. (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward

    So what happened to Z-wave and ZigBee? They "route around" and are mesh too.

    • Z-wave never scaled very well, it works best for very small networks. Zigbee on the other hand performs well and has been growing by leaps and bounds. Thread enjoys some technical advantages over Zigbee, such as adding routers as needed, but lacks the Zigbee application layer that allows different devices to talk a common language. The future is interesting indeed.

      • Zigbee on the other hand performs well and has been growing by leaps and bounds.

        And, as I hear it, BLE / "Bluetooth Low Energy" / "Bluetooth Smart" - a different networking protocol from original Bluetooth in the lower layers but sharing some of the upper layers, or at least the upper layer design approaches - was largely created (absorbed into the Bluetooth standard from its inventors, with their gleeful cooperation) in reaction to ZigBee's success.

  • Wrong takeaway. (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward

    " 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!

  • Cisco got the technology... (Score:5, Interesting)

    by __aaclcg7560 ( 824291 ) on Tuesday July 18, 2017 @02:20PM (#54834505)
    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.

    • Re:Cisco got the technology... (Score:4, Funny)

      by ls671 ( 1122017 ) on Tuesday July 18, 2017 @02:35PM (#54834589) Homepage

      I have this technology too!

      I simply use openvpn and the call stay up while hoping between network with different public exit IP addresses. No need for Cisco proprietary stuff and it works for hoping between any kind of wireless network even if the networks use completely different providers.

      https://slashdot.org/comments.... [slashdot.org]

    • mesh or hardwired AP's to the same network? did they have something unifi controller in the back end?

      • did they have something unifi controller in the back end?

        Controller in a switch on the backend. Worked pretty well. My boss's boss's boss wanted to fire me because a report showed that I used 75% of the wireless bandwidth through the controller. When he walked into the lab, he found 30 laptops with different 11ac wireless cards running the Cisco channel from YouTube. It just so happened that his interview at a Cisco Live event was running on all 30 laptops and that dazzled him from firing me on the spot. The kicker was that YouTube used 75% bandwidth while 300+ u

        • Re: (Score:2)

          by ls671 ( 1122017 )

          did they have something unifi controller in the back end?

          Controller in a switch on the backend. Worked pretty well. My boss's boss's boss wanted to fire me because a report showed that I used 75% of the wireless bandwidth through the controller. When he walked into the lab, he found 30 laptops with different 11ac wireless cards running the Cisco channel from YouTube. It just so happened that his interview at a Cisco Live event was running on all 30 laptops...

          Streaming the same thing by yourself on 30 different laptops at the same time, that is quite an achievement...

          • Streaming the same thing by yourself on 30 different laptops at the same time, that is quite an achievement.

            I wanted to create cardboard cutouts that look like console TV sets and taped over the laptop screens. My boss vetoed the idea because he wanted a professional lab look instead of a department store look.

        • Man you are lucky it wasn't kitten videos or worse.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by DarkOx ( 621550 )

      That is interesting, I was deploying Cisco Callmanger + Unity + WLC and Cisco wireless phones (wifi) in like 2003 and you could do that.

      • That is interesting, I was deploying Cisco Callmanger + Unity + WLC and Cisco wireless phones (wifi) in like 2003 and you could do that.

        IIRC, The main selling point for that product line was to have an integrated wireless controller inside a switch that could be activated with a software license key.

  • ZWAVE (Score:2)

    by dknj ( 441802 )

    is fucked.

  • RIP 2.4GHz ISM (Score:3)

    by thegreatbob ( 693104 ) on Tuesday July 18, 2017 @02:52PM (#54834705) Journal
    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.

  • 'Smart buidings' are more dangerous than 'AI' (Score:4, Insightful)

    by Rick Schumann ( 4662797 ) on Tuesday July 18, 2017 @03:32PM (#54834949) Journal
    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)'.
  • like:

    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.

    • AI is here, it is replacing more and more jobs everyday. to the point we can now predict in 50 years there will be no jobs.
      Fusion and solar power are kinda the same thing, given the sun is a really big fusion reactor.

      mesh networking is waiting for the hardware.
      I'm kinda sickened by the responses on here. The only difference between a decent mesh network setup and a standard network connection is no one controls the wires, its still your responsability to secure your hardware. Where did all the cryptoanarchi

      • With apologies to Steve McConnell [goodreads.com]:

        “AI is an algorithm in a clown suit. It’s less predictable, it’s more fun, and it comes without a 30-day, money-back guarantee.”

        Sorry, but what is being touted as AI ain't either. What is being pushed today as AI is little more than an unbaked solution to a badly under-determined system of linear equations.

        • 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.

  • This is not the first attempt [wikipedia.org] 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 or

  • 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?

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