A Compact and Cost-Effective BLE Beacon With Multiprotocol and Dynamic Content Advertising for IoT Application

Abstract

Bluetooth low-energy (BLE) beacons have been used in a variety of IoT applications. This article proposes a compact and cost-effective BLE beacon, which only uses a 2.4-GHz Gaussian frequency-shift keying (GFSK) transceiver and an ultralow power 8-bit 16-MHz microcontroller unit (MCU). The minimum requirements and the data processing procedure for commonly used GFSK transceivers to generate the BLE-compatible advertising packages are also provided in this article. Benefited from the compact architecture and the simple generation procedure, the BLE-compatible packages can be directly controlled to broadcast at any given radio frequency (RF) channel or time. Based on the flexible characteristics of our proposed beacon, the multiprotocol and dynamic content advertising are developed in this article. With the help of multiprotocol and dynamic content advertising, the proposed beacons can be used to provide more sophisticated services. Since the broadcast channels and time are freely controlled, the proposed BLE beacons are also very suitable for anti-collision applications with custom-defined channels and time intervals. The experimental results show that the proposed beacon can broadcast BLE-compatible protocol data units (PDUs) at a minimum interval of about 1 ms. The measured average current is about 51 uA when the advertising interval is 800 ms. Different protocols and dynamic content PDUs generated by the proposed beacon can be properly received by BLE-enabled devices, proving that they are fully compatible with the BLE specification. The measured bit rate of the proposed beacon in dynamic content advertising is about 198.4 kb/s.