Solution approach validation for a usecase (Nearable)

1

Dear Members,

I am describing my usecase and solution approach I am taking. It will be great if experts can validate and help.

Usecase: I am going to attach beacons to hundreds of product in a big mall. Products can be moving. I am creating an iOS consumer app. Consumer will move in a mall and if he spends significant time (around 5-10 seconds) around a product (near beacon), I will want it to be captured and then push promotional messages to consumer lately. Consumer can have app in terminated mode or in a running mode (background or foreground)

Solution Points:

  • Using nearable stickers
  • All stickers will have the same UUID. They will differ in major and minor number and based on major/minor, I will indentify the product.
  • Stickers will transmit iBeacon packets (as otherwise I believe I will not be able to monitor a region which will be an issue when app is terminated)
  • I will be monitoring a region identified by my UUID.
  • Once I move into a region, my app will be launched in a background mode for around 10 seconds. I will start ranging and get beacon major/minor IDs.
  • Once I move out of a region, I will stop ranging.
  • My sticker settings:
    a. packet type = iBeacon (to manage fleet of hundreds of beacon and support monitoring them while app is terminated)
    b. broadcast internal = 100mS (lowest to make sure ranging gives result sooner than later)
    c. power transmission = -20dB (to make sure regions are smaller and I get more entry/exits to start ranging often)

Questions and Issues:

  1. Is this the best and only approach? Is there any alternate approach/settings I can use?
  2. Once I made above settings, I could no longer detect stickers. Not even in iOS application of Estimote in foreground.
  3. Earlier I had my power set as default 0dB but that means huge region and that did not give me enough call backs for entering and exiting regions => I thought of narrowing a region by reducing power. Is this correct?
  4. Does ranging really work in initiated background mode (invoked from termination) and will I really get major/minor? When my power was 0dB, I got entry into a region callback, but ranging gave no beacon (count was always 0).

Will really appreciate your comments on above solution and questions.

Regards,
Shyamal

2

Can anyone from Estimote team respond to this please?

Regards,
Shyamal

3

Your use case should be perfectly implementable with stickers! Two notes:

  1. The default 0 dBm is about 5 m range. -20 dBm will give you a very short range, probably more like, 0.5 m.
  2. 100 ms advertising interval is very aggressive, remember that stickers has a tiny tiny battery, that’s why they’re so small.

If you can’t detect your stickers in the Estimote app anymore, try moving the phone very close to the sticker, since the -20 dBm you’ve set means the range is very short now. Another option is, the battery in your stickers died already, how long was the sticker set to 100 ms?

4

Thank you very much for your response.

I was running at 100ms frequency for hardly a day. I will want my range to be around 3m. What do you think will be the ideal power transmission? Earlier I had set it at 0dB and I hardly got exit region call back.

Another fundamental question is - what should be my packet type for my usecase? Can it be achieved using “nearable” packet type? I don’t think so. But can you please confirm?

Thanks again.

Shyamal