Suggestion for Mesh SDK - NFC provisioning feature

[Matthew K]

Hi there!!!

The NFC pairing demo from Nordic was fascinating! 

According to the Bluetooth SIG blog:

Provisioning Bearer
A provisioning bearer layer enables the transportation of provisioning PDUs between a provisioner and an unprovisioned device. Two provisioning bearers are defined:

  PB-ADV:

A provisioning bearer used to provision a device over the Bluetooth advertising channels. The PB-ADV bearer is used for transmitting Generic Provisioning PDUs. A device supporting PB-ADV should perform passive scanning with a duty cycle as close to 100% as possible in order to avoid missing any incoming Generic Provisioning PDUs.

    PB-GATT:

A provisioning bearer used to provision a device using Bluetooth mesh proxy PDUs from the proxy protocol. The proxy protocol enables nodes to send and receive network PDUs, mesh beacons, proxy configuration messages, and provisioning PDUs over a connection-oriented, Bluetooth Low Energy (LE) bearer. PB-GATT encapsulates provisioning PDUs within GATT operations, involving the GATT provisioning service and it is provided for use when a provisioner does not support PB-ADV.

From this post, I heard that PB-GATT feature and friend node feature will be added in the future.

After those features are added, how about adding a smartphone provisioning feature using the NFC antenna? Just like the NFC pairing demo!

Additionally, iOS 11 now supports Core NFC, so few iPhones can read NFC tags as well.

It would be great if it is possible to provision the wanted mesh node by tagging the smartphone. 

How do you think about this feature? I would love to hear feedback and opinions from the devzone members, please.

[tesc]

Hi,

NFC definitely sounds like a good option for OOB authentication during provisioning. It would be interesting to know it this is something that more people would like to see an example of.

Regards,
Terje

[Matthew K]

tesc said:

NFC definitely sounds like a good option for OOB authentication during provisioning.

Wow, thanks for your positive feedback! May I leave this thread unclosed for a moment so other members can reply freely?

[tesc]

Of course! Any feedback from other members is appreciated.

[leonwj]

Although I don't believe that they are based on nrf5x SoCs, my recollection is that these guys demonstrated NFC pairing coupled with Bluetooth Mesh provisioning at CES 2018 in January. So it's definitely a much simpler pairing solution for the SmartHome type of environment but maybe not as applicable to industrial deployments.

Given that Nordic have already demonstrated 'Touch to Pair' very well with the nrf52 SoCs with inclusion in the sdk as far back as sdk v13,  it would be great to get a mesh example (for provisioning) to help push that concept out to developers and their wider audience.

Regards,