The Bluetooth Special Interest Group (SIG) released its annual report "Bluetooth Market Latest News in 2023", revealing the latest development trends of Bluetooth technology and its expanding influence in various application markets. The report provides a preview of recent developments in Low Energy Audio (LE Audio) and Auracast™ broadcast audio, and predicts development trends during the transition from Bluetooth Classic Audio to LE Audio. The report also explores the release of global standards for wireless electronic shelf labels (ESL), as well as growing emerging markets such as Bluetooth location services, with a total market size of up to 10 trillion units.
Electronic shelf labels are becoming the new high-volume market
With the release of wireless standards for the electronic shelf label market, Bluetooth technology will assist the retail industry in the next stage of digital transformation, providing stores and shoppers with a better consumer experience. Electronic shelf labels provide precise, automated pricing and increased access to real-time promotions and product information for a more satisfying and integrated omnichannel experience. It is expected that shipments of Bluetooth ESL devices will reach 334 million units by 2027.
The new features of Bluetooth 5.4 version further enhance the security of Bluetooth wireless communication technology and help improve the user experience of Bluetooth Mesh networks and various GATT-based Bluetooth applications. New Bluetooth application specifications will be developed based on the new features. .
The new version also brings a new standard for electronic price tags. It is understood that the update of related technologies can, on the one hand, expand the number of price tag connections in a single network to 32,640, and on the other hand, enable two-way communication between the gateway and price tags.
Electronic price tag, also called Electronic Shelf Label (ESL), is an electronic display device with information sending and receiving functions. It is mainly used in electronic labels that display price information in supermarkets, convenience stores, pharmacies, etc.
Bluetooth 5.4 updates two functions related to electronic price tags:
- Periodic Advertising with Responses (PAwR, periodic broadcast with response)
PAwR will allow the implementation of star networks with two-way communication, a feature that increases the ability of ESL devices to receive data and respond to the transmitter. In addition, ESL devices can be divided into multiple groups, and each ESL device will have a specific address to maximize the number of connections and complete one-to-one and one-to-many communications.
one-to-one communication
one-to-many communication
In the figure, AP is the PAwR broadcaster; ESL is the electronic price tag (belongs to a different Grp and has an independent ID); subevent is a sub-event; rsp slot is a response slot. As shown in the figure, the black horizontal line is the AP sending commands and data packets to ESL, and the red horizontal line is the ESL response and feedback to the AP.
According to "Bluetooth Core Specification Version 5.4", ESL uses a device addressing scheme (binary) consisting of an 8-bit ESL ID and a 7-bit group ID. And the ESL ID is unique among different groups. Therefore, a network of ESL devices can contain up to 128 groups, with each group containing up to 255 unique ESL devices that are members of the group. To put it simply, there may be a total of 32,640 ESL devices in a network, and each tag can be controlled from a single access point.
- Encrypted Advertising Data (EAD, encrypted broadcast data)
EAD mainly provides the function of broadcast data encryption. After the broadcast data is encrypted, it can be received by any device, but can only be decrypted and verified by the device that previously shared the communication key. The significant benefit of this feature is that the content of the broadcast packet changes when the device address changes, thereby reducing the possibility of being tracked.
encrypted broadcast
Based on the updates of the above two functions, Bluetooth will have more advantages in electronic price tag applications. Especially when comparing 433MHz and private 2.4GHz, there is no internationally applicable communication standard for the two, and the practicality, stability, and security cannot be guaranteed. Especially in terms of security, the possibility of deciphering the two will be greater.
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