Abstract
Bluetooth Low Energy (BLE), a short-range and low-power communication protocol, has gained a lot of popularity in recent years. A part of BLE is the Generic Attribute Profile (GATT) which defines the data communication between two devices. During the initial connection between two BLE devices a discovery of services, characteristics and descriptors is required for the GATT to operate. During this discovery phase, the device is unusable as it builds the foundation for further data transactions. When unoptimized, this discovery step can take up to a few seconds, leading to frustrations for the end user or delays in some applications. In this paper, we aim to find guidelines on how to optimize this discovery process. A simulation framework was developed, able to simulate and analyze the packet exchange of the service discovery, while taking link layer parameters into account. The results show that minimizing the connection interval and maximizing the data length leads to the lowest discovery times. Practical experiments in real environment, however, show that the theoretically calculated times are not reachable due to processing overhead and retransmissions. Theoretical results also show that the current BLE discovery process, even after optimizations, has a lot of overhead. To fix the problems with the current protocol, this paper proposes a new Rapid Service Discovery Protocol, which enables a fast and efficient service discovery.
Highlights
During recent years, IoT technologies and sensor networks have gained a lot of attention
The discovery protocol of BLE is a part of the Bluetooth Low Energy specification which works on top of other different layers
As the normal service discovery process has disadvantages, such as the waiting time between connection intervals and the overhead of the request packages, we propose a new discovery protocol to be used alongside the other discovery protocol
Summary
IoT technologies and sensor networks have gained a lot of attention. Many wireless technologies for short-range communication are currently on the market, such as Bluetooth, Wi-Fi, Ultra-Wideband, or Zigbee All these technologies have their own specifications, which are mostly trade-off between several factors such as throughput and energy consumption [1]. Another short-range protocol which has gotten a lot of traction in recent years is Bluetooth Low Energy (BLE). The BLE wireless technology has been added to the Bluetooth specification since Bluetooth 4.0 working on the same 2.4 GHz ISM (Industrial, Scientific, and Medical) band as other well-known wireless protocols such as Wi-Fi, Zigbee and Bluetooth These protocols have the advantage that they are well adopted, and devices increasingly support these technologies [19]. Are the interoperability and active development advantages of the technology, and the low cost and its low energy consumption are factors making it a popular option [20]
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