connections

Nearby Connection

Nearby Connections is a high level protocol on top of Bluetooth/Wi-Fi that acts as a medium-agnostic socket. Devices are able to advertise, scan, and connect with one another over any shared medium (eg. BT <-> BT). Once connected, the two devices share a list of all supported mediums and attempt to upgrade to the one with the highest bandwidth (eg. BT -> Wi-Fi). The connection is encrypted, reliable, and fully duplex. BYTE, FILE, and STREAM payloads are all supported and will be chunked & transferred internally and recombined on the receiving device. See Nearby Connections Overview for more information.

Checkout the source tree

git clone https://github.com/google/nearby
cd nearby
git submodule update --init --recursive

Building Nearby, Unit Testing and Sample Apps

We support multiple platforms including Linux, iOS & Windows.

Building for Linux

NOTE: Linux has no mediums implemented.

Currently we support building from source using bazel. Other BUILD system such as cmake may be added later.

Prerequisites:

1. Bazel
2. clang with support for c++ 17+
3. Openssl libcrypto.so (-lssl;-lcrypto).

To build the Nearby Connection Core library:

CC=clang CXX=clang++ bazel build -s --check_visibility=false //connections:core  --spawn_strategy=standalone --verbose_failures

Building for macOS and iOS

NOTE: The only medium supported is Wi-Fi LAN.

Currently we support building with Swift Package Manager.

Prerequisites:

1. Xcode. Available from Apple Store.
2. Google Protobuf Compiler (protoc). If you have homebrew installed, you can do brew install protobuf.

To build the Nearby Connection library:

swift build

Supported Mediums

Legend
	Supported.
	Support is possible, but not implemented.
	Support is not possible or does not make sense.

Android

Mediums	Advertising	Scanning	Data
Bluetooth Classic
BLE (Fast)
BLE (GATT)
BLE (Extended)
BLE (L2CAP)
Wi-Fi LAN
Wi-Fi Hotspot
Wi-Fi Direct
Wi-Fi Aware
WebRTC
NFC
USB
AWDL

ChromeOS

Mediums	Advertising	Scanning	Data
Bluetooth Classic
BLE (Fast)
BLE (GATT)
BLE (Extended)
BLE (L2CAP)
Wi-Fi LAN
Wi-Fi Hotspot
Wi-Fi Direct
Wi-Fi Aware
WebRTC
NFC
USB
AWDL

Windows

Mediums	Advertising	Scanning	Data
Bluetooth Classic
BLE (Fast)
BLE (GATT)
BLE (Extended)
BLE (L2CAP)
Wi-Fi LAN
Wi-Fi Hotspot
Wi-Fi Direct
Wi-Fi Aware
WebRTC
NFC
USB
AWDL

iOS/macOS

Mediums	Advertising	Scanning	Data
Bluetooth Classic
BLE (Fast)
BLE (GATT)
BLE (Extended)
BLE (L2CAP)
Wi-Fi LAN
Wi-Fi Hotspot
Wi-Fi Direct
Wi-Fi Aware
WebRTC
NFC
USB
AWDL