Two-way communication with wait-slot scheme for neighbor discovery process in dense Bluetooth low energy networks

Abstract

Bluetooth Low Energy (BLE) Beacon technology is well on the way to becoming the future of business due to its inexpensive and low-power properties. All communications in BLE networks must involve neighbor discovery process (NDP) in the first place since a BLE device needs to create a connection or exchange information with its neighbors. Thus, the performance of the discovery latency is a challenging issue to be addressed for integrating BLE into the Beacon application development as the number of BLE devices increases. In this paper, we propose a twoway communication with wait-slot scheme (TCWS) to minimize the probability of collision occurring on the response frames of BLE devices and improve the latency of NDP. We formulate the state transition diagram for analyzing the performance of our proposed scheme. The results show that TCWS provides much better performance in terms of the probability of collision and the discovery latency in dense BLE networks.