Mobile device as node in BLE MESH

[Michal]

Hello, I am trying to design a product based on BLE MESH. I would need gateway to be able to accumulate data from network and send it outside. I need that gateway to connect to network without any interaction, when it would 'see' that other nodes are nearby it would 'interact' with them.

So to achieve that I was wondering if mobile device can be a mesh node. It not necesarily have to be fully functional. The android stack supports both scanning and advertising, I am not sure how ios. Is it possible at all and what would be limitation?

Other thing that comes to my mind is that every node would support GATT connection. But am I able to somehow automatically configure nodes to connect to nearest mobile device base on some kind of id?

Regards,

Michał

[Einar Thorsrud]

Hi,

Neither iOS or Android support BLE mesh directly. However, you can implement the high level mesh protocol (network layer and up) in the application, as indicated the Bluetooth SIG mesh FAQ:

What do I need to build a Bluetooth mesh networking smartphone application?

To develop smartphone or tablet applications for use with Bluetooth mesh networking products, if your mobile operating system provides suitable APIs which allow an application to meet the requirements relating to Bluetooth LE advertising packets defined in the Mesh Profile specification, you should use the advertising bearer. The advertising bearer is the preferred bearer in all cases. Where the advertising bearer cannot be used, you may use the Bluetooth mesh proxy protocol to enable communication with the mesh network via a proxy node. The proxy protocol can be implemented on top of standard Bluetooth Low Energy GAP and GATT APIs.

This is for example done in the nRF Mesh app (and IOS-nRF-Mesh-Library and Android-nRF-Mesh-Library).