TECHNOLOGY

Next-generation beacon “EXBeacon”

EXBeacon is a next-generation beacon with a variety of practical functions such as sending one-to-many (1: m) advertising signals as traditional beacons, as well as bidirectional and many-to-many (m:m) communications. By deploying multiple EXBeacons, they employ the m:m communication (flood-type mesh network) function to build a large platform. By deploying this platform in an indoor environment, it becomes a new infrastructure to collect information from the movement and state of people, things and various sensors in the space.

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What is Bluetooth mesh

The latest standard of Bluetooth developed for M2M communication was announced in July 2005.
The packet transmission method using flood-type mesh technology enables multi-terminal communication with high scalability that is difficult to disconnect.

Flood-type mesh network

It is a new Internet of things (IoT) which can be easily extended to thousands of nodes, without deciding on the transmission path, the packets are transmitted in a flood. There is redundancy that bypasses other routes even if radio waves are interrupted. The high degree of freedom of installation, easy to manage, etc. are the distinctive features. WHERE created a flooding technique which ensures a stable network order by introducing proprietary protocols such as cache control, packet relay control (TTL), and traffic control to manage the flood-type network which could be flooded if neglected.

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Frequency hopping technology

We are using the Industrial, Scientific, and Medical (ISM) 2.4 GHz radio bands, which is the same used for WiFi. Frequency hopping technology was introduced to avoid interference with WiFi etc. The portion of the radio spectrum we are using on the 2.4 GHz band, has 3 channels (37, 38, 39) which are different from the WiFi channels. We transmit the same packet randomly hopping on these 3 channels. Even if one channel is jammed others will survive, furthermore we built an interference-resilient network using retransmission function.

Communication standards

Unlike the conventional communication standard, the IoT standard specifies a data rate of about 100 kbps. Bluetooth mesh is a new communication standard with the range of 1 to 100 meters, which means it can cover building facilities.

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