A service-aware channel partition and selection for advertising in bluetooth low energy networks

Abstract

Beacon technology has gone a long way since its first appearance by Apple in 2013 and is expected to grow continually. Beacon, a small wireless transmitter, can send signals to other devices nearby. 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 the nearby scanners. In BLE 5.0, the protocol even improves advertising capabilities significantly. The new extended advertising packets are designed for expanding the possibilities of sending more data. When the beacon needs to broadcast more data through advertisements, the packets of different advertising services that need to be transmitted on specific channels should be considered for better transmission efficiency. However, the channel selection algorithms in BLE 5.0 are insufficient to support the transmission of diverse extended advertisements. In this paper, we give a clear classification of advertising services for BLE 5.0, propose a simple scheme to improve the channel utilization 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 analytical model show that the proposed scheme improves the transmission efficiency of extended advertising events in BLE 5.0 networks.