Introduction¶

Bluetooth Low Energy Beacons are a service that allow for highly localized positioning. The Beacon service is particularly useful for indoor positioning, low power positioning and location aware software. A particular use of the Beacon service is iBeacon. The iBeacon standard is a Apple specific implementation of Beacons.

The Basics¶

The Beacon service is a BLE Service that operates in advertising mode only. A Beacon service advertises 3 main things:

• A unique UUID (unique to a retailer)
• A Major number (ex a store number)
• A Minor number (ex a location in the store)

These three pieces of information are all you need for a Beacon service to work. The majority of the heavy lifting is done by the smart phone application that reads these three fields and then uses a web app or a database of some sort to turn these numbers into valueable information.

Example : Coffee Shop X¶

For example, if a smartphone app read a BLE Beacon with UUID = 0x1234546... , Major Number=5, Minor number = 3, it would check that against a database. From that database it would find out that UUID 0x123456... is owned by Coffee Shop X, that Major number 5 belongs to the store on main street and that Minor number 3 belongs to the coffee rack in that store. Then the application could check to see if there are any deals for the Coffee Shop X on Main Street on Coffee today. If there are any deals the phone could then alert the user and display a coupon code.

Example : Warehouse¶

For example, if a smartphone application read a BLE Beacon with UUID = 0x987654...., Major Number = 1, Minor Number = 2, it would check a database for that information. From

Technical Details¶