Bluetooth Low Energy beacon

The technology enables smartphones, tablets and other devices to perform actions when in close proximity to a beacon.

This is similar to previously used geopush technology based on GPS, but with a much reduced impact on battery life and much extended precision.

Another application is an indoor positioning system,[3][4][5] which helps smartphones determine their approximate location or context.

[7] The development of the "short-link" radio technology, later named Bluetooth, was initiated in 1989 by Dr. Nils Rydbeck CTO at Ericsson Mobile in Lund and Dr. Johan Ullman.

In 2010 Bluetooth 4.0 (Low Energy) was released with its main focus being reduced power consumption.

Apple's recommended setting of 100 ms advertising interval with a coin cell battery provides for 1–3 months of life, which increases to 2–3 years as advertising interval is increased to 900 ms.[9] Battery consumption of the phones is a factor that must be taken into account when deploying beacon enabled apps.

An energy efficient iBeacon application needs to consider these aspects in order to strike a good balance between app responsiveness and battery consumption.

In the case of Apple's iBeacon the UUID will be recognized by an app on the user device that will trigger an event.

However, with a UID based system the users device must connect to an online server which is capable of understanding the beacons UUID.

Other methods of advertising are also possible with beacons, URIBeacon and Google's Eddystone allow for a URI transmission mode that unlike iBeacons UID doesn't require an outside server for recognition.

[13] Bluetooth beacons are capable of transmitting their Received Signal Strength Indicator (RSSI) value in addition to other data.

[14] Bluetooth LE specification 5.1 added further more precise methods for position determination using multiple beacons.

[15] Beacons can be used in conjunction with pedestrian dead reckoning techniques to add checkpoints to a large open space.

[17] Bluetooth beacons are a good alternative to in house cameras due to their increased level of privacy.

Several commercial and free solutions exist, which are based on proximity detection, not precise positioning.

[18] In mid-2013, Apple introduced iBeacons and experts wrote about how it is designed to help the retail industry by simplifying payments and enabling on-site offers.

[22] URIBeacons are different from iBeacons and AltBeacons because rather than broadcasting an identifier, they send an URL which can be understood immediately.

[11] Eddystone-UID functions in a very similar way to Apple's iBeacon, however, it supports additional telemetry data with Eddystone-TLM.

Although the near-field communication (NFC) environment is very different and has many non-overlapping applications, it is still compared with iBeacons.