Low-power wireless advertising software library for distributed M2M and contextual IoT

Bluetooth Smart is emerging as arguably the first global low-power wireless standard for the Internet of Things, bringing with it billions of devices, or “Things”, capable of spontaneously broadcasting short messages to any potential receiving devices in range. If a widespread infrastructure of such receiving devices were to exist, these broadcast messages could be reliably captured, parsed, and forwarded in IP packets via the Internet to any and all concerned parties, enabling connectionless, distributed low-power M2M networks. In this paper we present advlib, a software library for parsing low-power wireless broadcast (also known as advertising) packets, with this objective. Experimental results indicate that, coupled with the necessary receiver infrastructure, in many cases at least the device vendor can be identified, validating the potential for M2M forwarding. Moreover, results suggest that sufficient semantically-meaningful information may be extracted by the library to support contextual IoT applications even at a local scale. Development continues on extending the support of known protocols and establishing the necessary relationships with device vendors.