FAQ

1. Is luXbeacon an active type beacon device? i.e., it has its own battery and can scan / being scanned for/ by nearby devices operating on bluetooth mode.
  • 1a. Any BLE beacon (including luXbeacon and Minew beacon F/W or H/W) should not do any or much scanning operation to search for nearby Bluetooth devices according to the standard iBeacon and BLE beacon protocol, as this is very power consuming and not necessary for the essential broadcasting purpose. Whereas, the scanning/receiving of beacon signals should only happens on the user smartphone side or BLE measurement devices (like BLE detector) according to the iBeacon/ BLE beacon standards;
  • 1b. The only chance of a short scanning operation is only for the initial/one-time beacon hardware configuration purpose, which is not supposed to be running after that due to the security and energy sustainability issue;
  • 1c. luXbeacon can run in batteryless mode if the location has the required lighting availability, or run with a backup battery for location with uncertain light availability.
2. If luXbeacon can scan nearby devices, will it capture the MAC addresses of these devices?
  • If some devices would scan and capture the MAC addresses of user smartphones, it is not following the purpose of BLE beacon or iBeacon standard devices. Hence, luXbeacon does not capture user smartphone MAC addresses.

Publications

  • K.E. Jeon, J. She, P. Soonsawad and P.C. Ng, "BLE beacons for Internet-of-Things applications: Survey, challenges and opportunities," 2018 IEEE Internet of Things Journal (accepted)
  • K.E. Jeon, T. Tong and J. She, "Preliminary design for sustainable BLE Beacons powered by solar panels," 2016 IEEE Conference on Computer Communications Workshops (INFOCOM WKSHPS), San Francisco, CA, 2016, pp. 103-109
  • K. E. Jeon, J. She, J. Xue, S. Kim and S. Park, "luXbeacon: A Batteryless Beacon for Green IoT: Design, Modeling, and Field Tests," in IEEE Internet of Things Journal, vol. 6, no. 3, pp. 5001-5012, June 2019.
  • K.E. Jeon, J. She and S. Wong "A crowd-assissted framework for securing BLE beacon based IoT infrastructure," Wireless Communications and Networking Conference (WCNC), 2018 IEEE.
  • K. E. Jeon and J. She, "User Existence-aware BLE Beacon Firmware for Maximized Battery Lifetime," in IEEE Transactions on Mobile Computing.
  • K. E. Jeon, J. She and S. Wong, "Extending BLE Beacon Lifetime by a Novel Neural Network-driven Framework," 2020 IEEE Wireless Communications and Networking Conference (WCNC), Seoul, Korea (South), 2020, pp. 1-6.
  • References

  • luXbeacon datasheet.
  • Media exposures of luXbeacon.
  • iBeacon standard from Apple Inc.
  • Eddystone standard from Google Inc.
  • Facebook Beacon and place tips
  • LINE Beacon and messaging API
  • Drag Beacon from CyPhy Media Ltd. for interactive signages
  • Roadmap

  • Firmwares supporting different CPUs/ sensors
  • Firmwares supporting nRF52 series