Backoff scheme for crowded Bluetooth low energy networks

Abstract

Bluetooth low energy (BLE) has received much attention from researchers as one of the prominent solutions for short-range communication. The applications of BLE are growing rapidly and there are many issues to be resolved for establishing the deployment of it. Practically, BLE devices may experience a lot of collisions during discovery process due to contention among devices, particularly in a crowded environment. With an increasing number of BLE devices, discovery latency and energy consumption rise exponentially, which could degrade the quality of service required by user applications. In this study, the authors propose an enhanced discovery mechanism by employing a backoff strategy for BLE devices to reduce collisions during advertisement process. Through experimental and mathematical analysis, the proposed mechanism has shown its effectiveness in terms of discovery latency and energy consumption in crowded BLE networks.