Adding a BLE Profile

BLE is a wireless personal area network technology used for transmitting data over short distances. It allows mobile applications to receive advertisements from beacons and deliver hyper-contextual content to clients based on location. The BLE profile incorporates Google’s Eddystone and Apple’s iBeacon to identify groups of devices and individual devices. Broadly, based on the configured BLE profile, the FortiAP broadcasts signals that the client receives when it comes in the configured proximity.

Individual AP overrides for BLE profile parameters are supported. See section Overriding FortiAP Settings.

Name - Enter a unique name for the BLE profile. Valid range is 1 – 32 characters.

Advertising – Select one or multiple supported advertising protocols, iBeacon, Eddystone UUID, Eddystone URL.

You can configure the following broadcast data for iBeacon.

• iBeacon UUID – Click Generate UUID to obtain a unique 128-bit identifier in 8-4-4-4-12 Hex format for a beacon. Specify wtp-uuid to generate FortiAP specific identifier.
• iBeacon Major ID – A unique identifier assigned to some beacons in a network and is used to distinguish this subset of beacons within a larger group of beacons. For example, beacons within a particular geographic area can have the same major number. The valid range is 0 -65535 with a default of 1000.
• iBeacon Minor ID - A unique identifier assigned to identify individual beacons. For example, each beacon in a group of beacons with the same major number, will have a unique minor number. The valid range is 0 -65535 with a default of 2000.

You can configure the following broadcast data for Eddystone UUID.

• Eddystone Namespace ID – A unique identifier assigned to some beacons in a network. This serves the same purpose as the aforementioned iBeacon Major ID. The valid range is 1 -20 Hex digits, the corresponding ASCII value is also displayed. You can enter the ID in ASCII format also using the ASCII link.
• Eddystone Instance ID - A unique identifier assigned to identify individual beacons. This serves the same purpose as the aforementioned iBeacon Minor ID. The valid range is 1 - 12 Hex digits, the corresponding ASCII value is also displayed. You can enter the ID in ASCII format also using the ASCII link.

Eddystone URL - The FortiAP broadcasts the configured URL as a beacon and the physical web or the latest Google Chrome plugin picks up the beacon and renders the URL into a web page. The URL supports HTTP and HTTPS and valid range is 1 -30 characters. The default is http://www.fortinet.com.

TX Power Level – Select a power level for the beacon’s transmit signal. The higher the power the greater will be the range of your signal. The valid range is –21 dBm to +5 dBm with a default value of 0 dBm.

Beaconing Interval - Select the time interval at which the successive beacons transmit signals to associated devices, that is, this sets the rate at which beacons advertise packets. The valid range is 40 -3500 milliseconds with a default of 100 milliseconds.

BLE Scanning – Enable scanning for BLE devices. This is disabled by default.

BLE Scan Report Interval – The interval to generate BLE scan report. The valid range is 10 – 3600 seconds with a default value of 30 seconds.