What are Beacons?

Beacons are small devices that transmit Bluetooth radio signals to phones, Bluetooth gateways, and even other beacons. A great article about beacons can be found here: https://www.beaconzone.co.uk/what_are_beacons

Finding Your Beacons

In order to work with beacons, it is important that they are both easily identifiable to your organization, and uniquely named. This makes it easy for your various applications to find your organization’s beacons and differentiate them from one another.

Beacons can transmit Bluetooth radio signals in Google’s Eddystone Format, Apple’s iBeacon Format, a proprietary format from a manufacturer, and in many instances, they can broadcast more than one of these formats at the same time.

Since Eddystone and iBeacon are the most dominant beacon formats, we are going to concentrate on naming standards for these two formats.

A great article about naming conventions for beacons can be found here.

Setting Up Your Beacon’s Identity

Eddystone

The Eddystone format uses two pieces of information to identify the beacon: the Namespace and the Instance.

In our case we are going to use the Namespace to represent the Organization or company, and the Instance will be a random 6 bit, 12 Hex digits (Digits are 0 to 9 or a to f) value.

We used the tool atWaraxe IT Security to convert our domain name into SHA-1 (a cryptographic hash function that takes an input and creates hex values) and used the first 20 characters as the Namespace.

Here is an example of what the name looks like:
Revolution11.com becomes dcfa937051d7f02c4130d170291507d485067271, the first 20 characters are our namespace (dcfa937051d7f02c4130)

iBeacon

The iBeacon format uses three pieces of information to distinguish a beacon’s identity (UUID, Major, Minor)

In our case we are going to use the UUID to represent the Organization or Company and the major and minor will be random values between 1 and 65535

Here is an example of what the name looks like:

d0285c83-2167-42e3-8d11-99a37cb97489   7654 9835

UUID Major Minor

Follow our blog series to understand where and how these naming standards will come into play as you utilize different applications with your beacons!

Download a PDF of this post: Beacon Naming Standards