Beacon Configuration Strategy Guide – Transmission Power

Wondering which factors you need to take into account when planning your beacon
deployment and how to properly set up your beacons?
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This is the second in our series of quick guides to help you optimize your beacon network setup and operations. Our previous post discussed the optimal Beacon ID strategy for your deployment.

• Beacon Transmission Power Basics
• Determining optimal beacon Transmission Power
• How much beacon range do you really need?
• How often are you really willing to change the beacon’s battery?
• When do you really need to use a higher Tx Power?
• Beacon installation recommendations

In this part, you’ll learn about Transmission Power (Tx Power)—one of the basic configuration settings you can implement in your beacons, and how this affects your deployment and subsequent operations.

Download our guide now.

The basic configuration settings for beacons include:

1. Transmission Power (also known as Tx Power) and
2. Signal Interval (how often your beacons push out a signal)

The settings you choose for Transmission Power and Interval will have a large impact on how your beacon network operates. Choosing the most practical and efficient settings is greatly determined by your specific needs and use case.
Today, we will focus on Transmission Power only, because there are a number of factors to consider when choosing the optimal Tx Power setting for your needs. The major things the above settings will affect include:

1. Signal range (greatly influenced by ibeacon Tx Power)
2. Signal stability (somewhat influenced by Tx power but more so by Interval)
3. Battery life (somewhat influenced by Tx power but more so by Interval)

Now it may be easy to say “I want the best of all three” but this is not always possible or even really necessary. The keyword here is efficiency and practicality—using too much or too little power can greatly affect the effectiveness of your beacon deployment. Let’s go over the particulars.

Beacon Transmission Power Basics

Your Transmission Power setting determines how powerfully the signal will be transmitted by your beacon. This is measured in dBm (decibel-milliwatts) and corresponds to a number rating (from 0 to 7) that you change via our Admin App (0 is least powerful – 7 is most powerful).

As you might expect, making your transmission more powerful will increase the range of your signal. It is also true, however, that the more powerful your transmission, the bigger the energy drain, and accordingly the shorter your battery life.
The table below shows how your Tx Power setting affects Kontakt.io Beacon’s range and battery life.

Determining optimal beacon Transmission Power

The best way to determine the best Tx Power for your needs is to answer the following questions:

How much beacon range do you really need?

For example, you may want to use the max Tx Power for beacons placed at a venue entrance. This is because you likely want as many people connecting with this beacon as possible (e.g. to send a welcome message.) In this case, you may need to sacrifice battery life to gain the widest range possible.

Alternatively, you may have beacons attached to a specific item (say an exhibit or shelf) where you only really want to connect to people who are standing directly in front of said item. In this case you certainly want to use a lower ibeacon Tx Power to conserve battery life, and still achieve the same expected results (i.e. sending relevant information about that specific item.)

How often are you really willing to change the beacon’s battery?

This is a question of cost vs. convenience vs. efficiency. Maybe you are perfectly willing to change your battery every month, or perhaps you vastly prefer getting a few years out of each battery.

Since you can configure beacons individually, it is also pretty simple to get the “best of both worlds”. For example, you could have a few entry / exit beacons with max Tx Power, and then the rest of your fleet might use a lower setting to extend the battery life.
Keep in mind however, that to maximize the value you get out of beacons—you may end up having to replace your batteries more often that you may prefer. It’s just good business sense; a little bit of bother to gain a lot of profit.

When do you really need to use a higher Tx Power?

This is a question of intended use. These are some of the common reasons our customers have given for using the maximum power setting:

• It is really important that this beacon can be found by as many people as possible e.g. to identity a landmark, or mark a meeting point.
• It is really important that visitors more than 5 meters away don’t miss the message attached to this beacon e.g. marking entry / exit from a zone, or helping someone find their seat.
• There is a lot of potential interference in the immediate vicinity of this particular beacon, so you need a powerful signal to cut through the interference e.g. many solid dense objects are surrounding the beacon (yes, people count as “dense heavy objects.”)

If the above situations do not apply to you, then you can likely get away with a lower Tx Power setting. This will help save your battery, and overall make your system operations more efficient.

Beacon installation recommendations

Here are some best practices of using Tx Power to get the best possible performance and battery life.

• If you need the signal range to be as wide as possible in a high traffic area, use the max power setting and install the beacon roughly 2 meters (6.5617 feet) up from the floor, to reduce interference from people walking by.
• If you only need the beacon to be detected a few meters or several feet away (say to identify a product sitting on a shelf,) use a lower power setting.
• Always be mindful of “line-of-sight” i.e. that in general, there are no objects in between a beacon and the customer’s smart device.
• If getting “line-of-sight” is impossible or impractical, try to make sure these objects are not too heavy or dense e.g. thick steel panels or brick walls between a beacon and smart device.

Also, remember that the battery in our beacons are replaceable.
More info about Transmission Power can be found in our Knowledge Base.
ADDITIONAL TIP:
Since beacons can have their Tx Power configured individually, it is easy to mix and match beacons with different Tx Power settings. This enables you to assign an optimal value to each beacon, based on the intended use of that beacon.

Read more:

• Beacon Configuration Strategy Guide – Beacon Interval
• Beacon Strategy Guide – UUID, Major, Minor
• Beacon Buyer’s Guide: Let’s Buy Beacons (Better)!