White paper: how to use Juniper Mist as BLE gateway

Juniper Mist

Kappa Data has been a trusted Juniper distributor in the BeLux area for many years. Through the acquisition of Mist, Juniper presents itself again very strong in the LAN/WLAN area where Gartner recognises them as Leader in the Magic Quadrant. The combination Juniper Mist is strongly supported by AIDE (Artificial Intelligence-Driven Enterprise) and has led to many successes in the BeLux market.

What is less known is that most Juniper Mist APs also have BLE antennas onboard, which can be used primarily for indoor positioning, but they can also pick up BLE beacons from nearby BLE devices.

When these BLE devices transmit telemetry, it is possible to pick up their payload with the Juniper Mist APs and then forward them to an IoT suite such as Kappa Data’s ThingsFlow Lite.

IoT and IT come together

Often the IoT world and the IT world seem like two different worlds. Separate infrastructure and technology are needed, the protocols are different, … but since many Wireless vendors are also starting to build BLE into their access points, the worlds are getting closer together.

Then, with the same infrastructure to offer WiFi, the IoT world can be entered as well.

How does this work?

To set up this PoC, we used the following items:

• Fog AP41
• Fog BT11
• RuuviTag (BLE beacon with temperature, humidity and air pressure sensors)
• Mist cloud platform
• ThingsFlow ARE
• ThingsFlow Lite

The architecture works as follows:

The beacons send packets with telemetry on a very regular basis. The Juniper Mist Access Points receive them because they are constantly listening. Via webhooks, all packages are sent to the ThingsFlow Advanced Ruling Engine. This filters the relevant packets, decodes the payload and sends it to ThingsFlow Lite.

At the Site level, we define the incoming relay of the ThingsFlow ARE module.

We filter in the first node on the MAC address so that we are left with only our Ruuvi beacons. In the next node, we decode the payload to a JSON and then send it to ThingsFlow Lite.

We log into the ThingsFlow Lite platform and see that the data is coming incorrectly!

Solution

This is obviously a PoC but shows the power of Juniper Mist as a BLE gateway. It is possible to send all BLE telemetry (any protocol) through Mist to your own platform. This opens the doors to numerous use cases.

Interested in more information? Please contact us.