Tell Me About IoT.Over.Beacon

A key enmo differentiation is our IoT.Over.BeaconTM technology.

When I say IoT.Over.Beacon, people usually people ask me to tell them about it  – what does it mean, how does it work, how is it different, etc.  And that’s what I’m going to do here.

IoT.Over.Beacon is standard Bluetooth Low Energy (BLE) used in a new and revolutionary way.  It’s enmo proprietary technology, patent pending. It can run on any IoT device with a Bluetooth radio.

Bluetooth has two operating modes – Discovery/Pairing mode and Advertising mode.

An example of Discovery/Pairing is setting up your phone to connect to your car.

IoT devices today use Discovery/Pairing Mode.  But Discovery & Pairing are major limitations in mobile IoT:

  • How to put IoT device into Discovery mode if it isn’t easily accessible? For example, what if the IoT device is mounted in the ceiling? Or at the end of a crane boom? How are you going to reach the button on the IoT device to put it into Discovery?
  • What if the user doesn’t know how to put the IoT device into Discovery mode? For example, let’s say you have an IoT device on a bus reading pollution data, with sensor data sent to the bus driver’s phone.  If a new driver drives a bus, you’ll have to train them on how to put the IoT device into Discovery mode.  What happens if he/she forgets?
  • As the number of users & IoT device scale, Discovery & Pairing becomes unrealistic. Are you really going to go around to 100 devices and Discovery/Pair them? What if you have 50 users and 1000 IoT devices?

Advertising Mode doesn’t use Discovery/Pairing so doesn’t have these limitations.  BUT but has its own limitation – no payload! There is no provision in Advertising Mode to send a payload of IoT sensor data.

And that’s why IoT deployments today are using Discovery/Pairing mode despite its limitations – it’s the only way to pass a payload to the phone. Until enmo arrived on the scene that is!

IoT.Over.Beacon is Advertising Mode Bluetooth with proprietary enmo extensions to pass a payload. Key benefits of IoT.Over.Beacon are:

  • NO Discovery, NO Pairing
  • Much easier to use
  • Scalable
  • Enables new & valuable IoT use cases

Here’s a comparison table showing the differences between Discovery/Pairing Bluetooth and IoT.Over.Beacon

And here’s our Mobile IoT graphic showing how IoT.Over.Beacon fits in: