Bluetooth is one of the most succesfull short range point-to-point radio protocols in the world. It's known for it's low power and versatility. Until now the short range and point-to-point nature were major drawbacks for using Bluetooth in home automation. Bluetooth Mesh is built on the new Bluetooth 5 standard and solves both problems making it the best protocol out there for home automation and other IoT applications.
Mesh networking
We all know classic star networks in which many nodes connect to a single gateway, for example WiFi. All nodes in such a star network must be in range of the gateway to talk to each other. The range of the network is thus limited by the node-to-gateway distance. In a mesh network all nodes can talk directly to each other and relay messages for other nodes in the network. It's thus no longer required for two nodes to be in direct range of each other as long as there are enough other nodes in between. This makes the range of a Bluetooth Mesh network virtually infinite.
More data and better radio.
The Bluetooth 5 low energy specification onto which the Bluetooth Mesh is built requires the hardware to have a more sensitive reciever. Because of this requirement new Bluetooth radio chips such as the Nordic nRF52832 have a range of about 100 meters, thats 5 times more than older Bluetooth functions. On top of that the theoretical throughput is 1Mbps which makes the Bluetooth Mesh a good candidate for audio streaming.
Open standard
Just as important as the technology behind the mesh is the fact that it's an open standard. Many proprietary mesh protocols are currently in the market but they don't have to capability of interoperating with each other. This means you can't use a wall switch of brand A with a LED driver of brand B. Bluetooth Mesh defines 'models' for many popular devices like lighting, switches, sensors, ... which can all talk to each other.
