An Early Wake-up and Access Barring Scheme for Improving the Probability of NDP in BLE Networks

Abstract

IoT (Internet of Things) has become attractive and ubiquitous in recent years. BLE (Bluetooth Low Energy) is a protocol widely used in IoT. For BLE, it has low cost, low energy consumption, and is supported on most types of mobile phones. BLE Beacon which is widely applied in many situations, such as shopping malls and indoor navigation, is an application based on the BLE network. This paper is aimed at proposing a feasible scheme to enhance the performance of the BLE Beacon application. communications in BLE networks involve the neighbor discovery process (NDP) in the first phase to create a connection or exchange information with neighbors. When more people with mobile devices simultaneously send requests to the BLE Beacon, the success probability of the NDP decreases and then the latency of the NDP increases. It leads to poor customer experience. Therefore, we propose an Early Wake-Up and Access Barring (EWAB) scheme to improve the NDP performance among an advertiser and multiple scanners. The scheme makes good use of the information that can be contained in the advertising packet to adjust the scan interval and the backoff window dynamically. The results show that EWAB provides better performance in terms of the probability of successful discovery, the mean discovery latency, and power consumption in the BLE networks.