The NAO Suite is designed to be interoperable with 3rd party BLE beacons and tags. This page aims at providing a first layer of interoperability requirements to ease the compatibility assessment with beacons & tags vendors.
Disclaimer: This list is a public limited extract of Pole Star interoperability guidelines. The full guidelines require an NDA in place to be shared. To fully validate the interoperability of a 3rd party BLE beacon/tag before a customer project, Pole Star recommends going through a qualification phase in our Toulouse lab.
| # | Category | Requested value | Importance |
| REQ1 | BLE beaconing (Bluetooth LE advertising) | Broadcast Undirected Advertising PDU Type (ADV) packets, using LE_1M modulation | Major |
| REQ2 | Advertising parameters | Advertise on all 3-primary channels (37, 38, 39). | Medium |
| REQ3 | Bluetooth MAC Address | Static | Medium |
| REQ4 | Transmit power | >0 dBm Static | Medium |
| REQ5 | Advertising Payload | Should be static | Major |
| REQ6 | Advertising rate | 100ms to 1s | Major |
| REQ7 | Advertising Packet type | Should be of ADV_NON_CONN_IND type (not connectable) | Medium |
| REQ8 | Advertising Payload type | iBeacon type. follows Apple Proximity Beacon specification D1.0 (this includes UUID, Major and Minor different from '0'). See https://developer.apple.com/ibeacon | Major |
| REQ9 | Proximity UUID | 1 single static UUID | Major |
| REQ10 | Major / minor identifiers | Unique and static {major,minor} combination for every beacon | Major |
| REQ11 | iBeacon identifiers vs. MAC address | No interleaving of different iBeacon frames/identifiers on the same MAC address | Major |
The NAO Suite is also interoperable with non-iBeacon BLE beacons, please contact Pole Star to assess the interoperability of such devices.
3rd party BLE tags implementing requirements 1 through 7 (included) in the table above can be used with Pole star NAO Track RTLS solution.