BLE Neighbor Discovery Parameter Configuration for IoT Applications

Abstract

Since the Internet of Things (IoT) applications today employ many different sensors to provide information, a large number of the Bluetooth low energy (BLE) devices will be developed as part of the IoT systems. The low-power and low-cost requirements of all BLE nodes are among the most challenging issues when supporting the neighbor discovery process (NDP) for such a large number of devices. Since the parameter settings are essential to achieve the required performance for the NDP, a parameter configuration method for neighbor discovery in BLE can be beneficial for determining some critical parameter metrics, such as the AdvInterval, ScanInterval, and ScanWindow. In this paper, we propose a parameter configuration scheme to balance the tradeoff between discovery latency and energy consumption. In the proposed scheme, the neighbor discovery latency and average energy consumption are expressed based on the Chinese Remainder Theory (CRT). With the expected primary performance, the parameters are configured accordingly using the parameter configuration algorithm. The experimental results show that the performance of the neighbor discovery varies with the parameter settings. Furthermore, two typical IoT applications are assessed in this paper. Compared with the simulation results, the proposed parameter configuration scheme can achieve high accuracy.