Bluetooth releases more advanced direction-finding capabilities
Martin Wootley’s article gave a good technical look at Bluetooth’s new direction finding.
We all know Bluetooth has been a leader in location-based services technology. Bluetooth utilizes positioning systems and proximity solutions. In particular, Bluetooth beacons are tremendously successful. The Bluetooth beacon provides proximity and positioning services to places like airports, museums, stadiums, train stations, and many more.
As incredible as today’s beacons are, there are more and more cases that need more accurate positioning data or require determination of the direction an object is in. Sometimes, both of these are required.
To fix this issue, Bluetooth released its latest version of the Bluetooth Core Specification. This possesses new capabilities including high accuracy direction finding.
The controller specification and the Host Controller Interface (HCI) have both been improved. The controller specification now has specialized hardware that includes an antenna array used to determine the calculation of the direction of a received radio signal. “The Host Controller Interface (HCI) has also been modified so that data acquired by the controller can be made available to higher layers of the stack where direction calculations can take place,” (Martin Wooley, Bluetooth.com).
With this new Bluetooth Direction Finding, proximity and positioning systems can now be devised for things like indoor positioning, wayfinding, asset tracking, object finding, and directional discovery.
What does this new technological innovation mean? This accurate direction finding will be widely used across manufacturers and open the way for a new generation of even more advanced Bluetooth location services.
For even more information on this, read this article to get a technical breakdown.