GS1beacon: GS1 standard based integrated beacon service platform

Abstract

Bluetooth Low Energy beacon service is the newest Online-to-Offline technology. A beacon application in users smartphone connects an offline physical beacon with an online service produced by a service provider. However, since the BLE beacon separately operates by each service provider, users need to run multiple providers applications to access different providers service. This leads to much energy and resource consumption which potentially hinders other common uses of the smartphone. In this paper, we proposed GS1beacon, a GS1 standard based integrated BLE beacon service platform which could find the desired service regardless of providers applications, and provide multiple services in a single BLE beacon. To realize this, we construct a global discovery system by using an Object Name Service (ONS) and unify format of a BLE beacon ID by using a GS1 ID keys. Additionally, we prototyped GS1beacon service platform and showed its feasibility through case study, and performance evaluation.