The Bluetooth addressing can tell you a lot about the Bluetooth device that you are trying to connect to, such as which company has produced the device. The MAC address is also one of the first bits of data that a gateway has about a device when it does a BLE scan, and in this project, we use it as the unique identifier in our database to distinguish devices as belonging to this project.
The Bluetooth Standard
The Bluetooth standard describes how the MAC address of a Bluetooth device relates to the device manufacturer, for example that in the image below (image from 2 ) - in this example, a company has paid for an Organizationally Unique Identifier (OUI), which means the top 24 bits of this address are publicly registered to a company, and this device can now have a universally unique MAC address instead of being assigned a random address.
This identifier is assigned by IEEE, which will also publish the address in a public registry 3. IEEE created a PDF tutorial for understanding these address identifiers [4].
Other References
- https://macaddresschanger.com/what-is-bluetooth-address-BD_ADDR - Quick primer on Bluetooth addresses
- https://stackoverflow.com/questions/21302302/uuid-and-macaddress-for-bluetooth-ble - Some simple questions answered from a practical standpoint, such as how addresses are randomized, etc.
- https://macaddresschanger.com/bluetooth-mac-lookup - Shows you how your MAC address can show you information about a device, as long as the address OUI is registered with the Bluetooth SIG.