DynGATT: A dynamic GATT-based data synchronization protocol for BLE networks

Abstract

Bluetooth Low Energy (BLE) is a wireless communication technology for power-constrained Internet of Things (IoT) applications. BLE data can be transmitted via either the IPv6 or the Generic ATTribute (GATT) Profile protocol, with the former supporting dynamic IoT structures and the latter being application-friendly. In fact, GATT requires the data layout to be known in advance by peer devices, in order to properly interpret the received data. In this paper, we introduce DynGATT, a protocol that achieves the benefits of both IPv6 and GATT, by extending GATT in a seamless fashion to support dynamic IoT structures. The key idea of DynGATT is to use GATT descriptors, originally intended to specify data in static IoT scenarios, to also specify IoT systems whose structures may dynamically evolve. Peer devices reading these descriptors will know how to interpret the data of GATT characteristics provided by devices joining the IoT network. Because no additional data have to be transmitted, the connection time is then reduced with respect to classical BLE. DynGATT has been implemented and tested in an agricultural IoT application, with different types of sensor nodes. Our experimental evaluation shows that DynGATT is very power-efficient, despite its added flexibility. Its worst-case power consumption is only around 19.37µA per data transmission and around 41.37µA overall. This consumption can be further reduced by using the methods discussed in this paper. To the best of our knowledge, this work is the first to support dynamic IoT structures in a GATT-based setting.