Bluetooth 5.1 brings new “direction-finding” features that will let Bluetooth devices pinpoint physical location to the centimeter, aiding in indoor positioning. This latest version includes features that will make for more reliable Bluetooth connections, too.
Bluetooth Devices Can Now Pinpoint Your Location
Current Bluetooth proximity systems can guess how far away a device—like your smarthome or smartwatch—is by using signal strength. They might know you’re a few meters away, but they don’t know the direction.
That’s enhanced with a new direction-finding feature in Bluetooth 5.1, which was just announced by the Bluetooth Special Interest Group (SIG,) the industry group that oversees Bluetooth. A positioning system can now determine the direction a Bluetooth signal is coming from. Combining distance and direction, Bluetooth devices can now figure out the precise location of a device down to the centimeter.
Bluetooth 5.1 offers two different methods for determining direction, named “Angle of Arrival” (AoA) and “Angle of Departure” (AoD). One of the two devices must have an array of multiple antennas, and the data received from those antennas can be used to identify the direction the Bluetooth signal is coming from.
If you’re carrying a smartphone around and that phone has Bluetooth 5.1, a positioning system can have a good idea about your exact location. This could be used to improve navigation indoors, find your lost keys, or enable smarthome hardware to better pinpoint your location.
Faster Connection Initiation With Less Power Spent
As you might expect from the version number, Bluetooth 5.1 isn’t a huge leap with a lot of changes, as Bluetooth 5.0 was. Its other changes are fairly minor, but are still helpful.
Bluetooth Low Energy devices use something called the “Generic Attribute Profile,” or GATT. Whenever a client device connects, it performs “service discovery” to see what the server device supports. This takes time and energy. Bluetooth 5.1 performs more aggressive caching, and clients can skip the service discovery stage when nothing has changed. These “GATT caching enhancements” mean the connection happens faster and less energy is spent.
RELATED: Bluetooth 5.0: What’s Different, and Why it Matters
Connection Advertising Improvements
Bluetooth 5.1 includes several improvements to advertising. The word “advertising” here refers to how a Bluetooth device broadcasts it’s available to connect, advertising its availability to other nearby Bluetooth devices. This should make connections work better.
