Interoperability Challenge

2019 has been a breakthrough year for Bluetooth mesh. 2 years after the adoption of the Bluetooth mesh specifications, we finally started seeing real market traction. It has been a looong ride. I remember the first ideas about running a mesh network over Bluetooth LE started circulation around 2012, the year when the Zigbee - based Philips Hue was released. We loved the Hue and we hated the bridge that was attached to it. But the idea of running a mesh network over the Bluetooth radio was very strange and most people were like "why would you want to do this?".

We had our rationale, which I was explaining many times... User experience, scalability, security were the key objectives. And clearly the mesh has delivered on all these fronts. It came, however, with a price tag: complexity of the stack.

Bluetooth mesh is a great low power mesh networking system. This has been confirmed by more and more organizations using it in their products. But from the implementation perspective it is very complex. That complexity is there to make it shine and perform. Nowadays, anything that is great to use and performs well, is complex. Internal / architectural complexity is simply a consequence of the requirements product requirements: must provide great user experience, be able to scale and be secure.

The success of Bluetooth mesh fuels its popularity. And not surprisingly, there are many vendors who want to ride this wave, without bearing the cost of complex implementations. So they either make shortcuts, implementing just portions of what is needed, or just try pretending to be the real thing, while they are not. What adds to the problem here is "mesh" is a common term and cannot be trademarked. So anyone running any system that is based on [Bluetooth] LE may claim it is "mesh". And it is really hard to distinguish a product implementing some mesh from a product implementing the mesh.

That has created an interoperability problem. Buyers and specifiers have difficult task finding products that are the real Bluetooth mesh products. This has gotten to a point where I personally realized we need to improve. Significantly improve.

This has become now my personal challenge. The challenge that has been accepted. I want to put a lot of effort into sorting out this interoperability problem. The solution will not arrive overnight, as it requires quite a lot of work. The good thing is that I am not alone. Bluetooth has always been about team work. And I believe there are many individuals and companies who share my view of the problem and equally want to solve it. Bluetooth - the organization - is also a great environment for solving important problems. And the interoperability is probably the next most important, after we have solved the three initial ones: UX, scalability and security.