The Cisco Meraki MR30H, MR32, MR33, MR42, MR52, MR53, MR72, MR74 and MR84 WiFi access points have a built-in BLE iBeacon Advertising mode. You can enable the beacon right from the Cloud-hosted dashboard and configure the UUID, Major, and Minor. Meraki’s BLE enabled access points enable customers to begin developing practical applications for BLE devices. For example, you can use the BLE beacon advertising in a mobile app to trigger notifications or determine the position of the smartphone for wayfinding. These can be broadly categorized into ‘push’ applications, where the AP informs an aware device that it is in a certain location, or ‘pull’ applications, where the AP listens for beacons and uses this information to assist with asset tracking and control through the dashboard.

Configuring Beacons

Beacons are periodic signals emitted using Bluetooth Low Energy radio technology and conforming to a specific data packet format. The data packet looks like this:

The Preamble, Access Address, Header, MAC Address, and CRC will be set as part of the BLE radio’s frame construction. The TX Power is a calibrated indicator of the RSSI of the transmitted measured at a 1m distance; this can be used for rough estimation of proximity to the device emitting the Beacons.

UUID, Major, and Minor are fields defined by the Beacon network administrator. Typically, an organization will define a unique identifier for their habitual usage: the UUID. All Beacons deployed throughout their locations would have the same UUID.

To differentiate Beacons at different offices or store locations, and Beacons within different areas of those locations, the Major and Minor fields are used. For example, a chain restaurant might decide that all restaurants within a city will share a Major, and each restaurant within that city will have a different Minor.

Meraki APs with an integrated Bluetooth Low Energy radio can emit Beacons with following technical specifications:

• Beacon interval: 100 ms
• Transmit power: 0 dBm

Figure 4: Enabling BLE Beacon advertising

Once advertising is enabled, the UUID, Major, and Minor fields of the Beacon frame can be set. The Major/Minor values can either be set automatically and uniquely assigned on a per-AP basis for the network, or can be assigned globally for all AP's in the network. When advertising is enabled, Unique mode will be the default setting.

Unique mode will automatically assign the same major value and unique minor values to each AP in the network. If Unique mode is configured on a parent template network, then the networks bound to that template will assign unique major values per network, and unique minor values per AP within those networks.

Saving these settings will activate the BLE Beacon on the Meraki AP’s integrated Bluetooth Low Energy radio.

Figure 5: Setting the BLE Beacon UUID/Major/Minor

Figure 6: Assigning the Unique Major/Minor Values

Figure 7: Assigning the Non-unique Major/Minor Values

Viewing Beacon Values

After the unique or non-unique values have been configured, you can view the assigned values from the Wireless > Bluetooth settings, as shown in the above Figures 6 and 7. Additionally, these values can be retrieved via the Dashboard API as shown below:

Get Network Bluetooth Settings

GET /networks/{networkId}/bluetoothSettings

CopySuccessful HTTP Status: 200
[
  {
    "name":"My AP",
    "lat":37.4180951010362,
    "lng":-122.098531723022,
    "serial":"Q2XX-XXXX-XXXX",
    "mac":"00:11:22:33:44:55:66",
    "model":"MR34",
    "address":"1600 Pennsylvania Ave",
    "lanIp":"1.2.3.4"
    "tags":" recently-added ",
    "networkId":"N_1234",
    "beaconIdParams": {
      "uuid": "00000000-0000-0000-0000-000000000000",
      "major": 5,
      "minor": 3,
    }
  }
]

Figure 8: API response after querying the Dashboard API to list the devices in a network