Making phone as Proxy

[Karthi]

Hello,

I am trying to understand the working of BLE Mesh network and have the following question.

Is it possible to make phone as Proxy as well as Provisioner? BLE Mesh spec suggests that phone can be run as provisioner.

But is it possible to run it as Proxy, assuming it is always present in the same BLE Mesh environment?

Thanks in Advance!!!

[awneil]

It would depend if the phone hardware & software had the necessary support, and allowed it ...

[Karthi]

For hardware support, is having BLE radio is enough?

And wrt to software, is it sufficient if 'Proxy protocol' is implemented on top of BLE?

Or am I missing something?

And I read that "To scan the advertisement channels for incoming packets, the ble mesh nodes use a 100% duty cycle. This means that nodes in the mesh are always scanning unless they are sending a packet".

Considering the above statement, If a mobile phone becomes a proxy, it would also be required to use 100% duty cycle. Would it have any other implications other than draining the battery?

[Hung Bui]

Hi Karthi, 

By theory it's possible to make the phone a normal mesh node. 

Be able to scan for BLE advertising packet is all it needs. 

However I'm not sure if you can force the phone to do scanning 100% duty cycle. Very often the antenna for bluetooth is shared with the wifi antenna. 

In addition, since there is no native Bluetooth Mesh stack on the phone, you would need to implement it in your app. 

We currently don't have support for this feature. We have the minimal stack for the proxy client feature, but not the full stack and no ADV bearer support. 

[Karthi]

okay. Thank you!!!

[awneil]