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:

Bazel
clang with support for c++ 17+
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:

Xcode. Available from Apple Store.
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
[x]	Supported.
[ ]	Support is possible, but not implemented.
	Support is not possible or does not make sense.

Android

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

ChromeOS

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

Windows

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