A Service-Aware Scheme for Improving Channel Selectivity of BLE Beacon Advertising

Abstract

As Bluetooth Low Energy (BLE) is a low-cost wireless technology, it has emerged to dominate a beacon technology market. BLE advertising is a critical part of the protocol that can broadcast messages to nearby scanners. Based on BLE 5.0 specification promising new functionality for connectionless services, the wide-ranging enhancements implemented in BLE advertising mechanisms open unlimited possibilities for more advanced beacons. For the advertising packets, beacons can increase the payload size or use chained packets so that more content can be provided in an advertising event. However, the channel selection algorithms in BLE do not support the transmission of diverse extended advertisements. The packets of different advertising events that need to be transmitted on specific channels should be considered for better transmission efficiency. In this paper, we give a clear classification of advertising services for BLE beacons, propose simple channel selectivity schemes to improve the service ratio, and show an analytical model to study the blocking probability of the BLE advertising network. In addition, we use this analytical model to identify the blocking performance of the network. Simulation results validated by the analytical model show that the proposed schemes improve the transmission efficiency of advertising services in BLE beacons.