The Internet of Things (IoT) interacting with remote sensor devices over the Internet. To connect a device to the Internet, a local low power wireless connection is required. In most applications and solutions the sensor devices connect to a gateway and via Ethernet connect to the Internet.

To ensure optimum connectivity between the Bluetooth sensor nodes and an IoT gateway, Malmo, Sweden-based connectBlue has upgraded its Bluetooth Dual-mode access point RBE221s with IoT gateway functionality.

Rolf Nilsson, CEO of connectBlue said, “Internet of Things is the hottest topic right now and the potential is huge; predictions span from 25–50 billion IoT devices by 2020. But in order to fully utilize the IoT architecture, you need a Gateway to get access to the Bluetooth low energy sensor nodes and this IoT Gateway is now added via our Access Point (News - Alert).”

The Bluetooth dual-mode access points are also known as Bluetooth smart ready access points. On connecting the access points to the Internet via Ethernet, the Web application running on a Web server will be able to access the data in the Bluetooth smart devices that are connected to the access point.

The presence of the IoT Gateway (News - Alert) functionality will enable the Web applications to access any Bluetooth low energy device via HTTP commands, simultaneously. As the RBE221s is a Bluetooth smart ready gateway it can leverage the standard generic attribute profile (GATT) to access all Bluetooth Smart devices.

connectBlue is looking to this enhanced functionality to serve its industrial and medical industry customers with optimized  wireless applications now. IoT Gateways can be used in industrial applications to read temperature data from various sensors using a Web interface, from even a smartphone.

In medical applications, IoT Gateways can be used to access real-time data from patients’ heart rate monitors by using customized Web applications on any Internet connected Web device.

The connectBlue access points serve as a Bluetooth to Ethernet enabler as it supports point-to-multipoint connectivity where several slaves or clients can be connected to the 10/100 Base-T Ethernet network. Based on the Bluetooth Specification v4.0, the RBE221s can ensure a wireless range of up to 300 meters.