Advertisement Interval to Minimize Discovery Time of Whole BLE Advertisers

Abstract

As the Internet of Things is expected to become pervasive in everyday life, it is also expected that numerous applications and services with a large number of bluetooth low energy (BLE) devices will be developed for areas such as sports arenas, subways, shopping malls, and many other busy public places. The fast discovery of all BLE advertisers is one of the most challenging tasks in supporting such a large number of BLE-enabled services successfully. However, there has been no research published so far that presents a method of setting parameters that provide the best performance in the BLE neighbor discovery process. In this paper, we propose a method to determine an optimal value for the BLE advertisement interval to minimize the time in which all surrounding BLE advertisers are discovered by a scanner. To obtain the optimal advertisement interval, we derive a new analytical model to characterize the BLE discovery time with all possible parameters. We also analyze the effect of the optimal advertisement interval on energy consumption. The analytical model is validated by comparing the analysis results with the simulations. The simulation results show that the optimal advertisement interval for a given number of BLE advertisers can minimize the discovery time, and the energy consumption also is reduced significantly.