Bluetooth Low Energy Devices Research Articles

Analysis of latency performance of bluetooth low energy (BLE) networks.

Bluetooth Low Energy (BLE) is a short-range wireless communication technology aiming at low-cost and low-power communication. The performance evaluation of classical Bluetooth device discovery have been intensively studied using analytical modeling and simulative methods, but these techniques are not applicable to BLE, since BLE has a fundamental change in the design of the discovery mechanism, including the usage of three advertising channels. Recently, there several works have analyzed the topic of BLE device discovery, but these studies are still far from thorough. It is thus necessary to develop a new, accurate model for the BLE discovery process. In particular, the wide range settings of the parameters introduce lots of potential for BLE devices to customize their discovery performance. This motivates our study of modeling the BLE discovery process and performing intensive simulation. This paper is focused on building an analytical model to investigate the discovery probability, as well as the expected discovery latency, which are then validated via extensive experiments. Our analysis considers both continuous and discontinuous scanning modes. We analyze the sensitivity of these performance metrics to parameter settings to quantitatively examine to what extent parameters influence the performance metric of the discovery processes.

Performance evaluation of bluetooth low energy in indoor positioning systems

AbstractLocal positioning systems (LPS) are attracting much attention, both commercially and scientifically, as they represent a natural extension of global positioning systems to indoor scenarios. Amongst all the viable wireless technologies used in this context, WiFi and Bluetooth are the most widely extended. These technologies are also chosen for their simplicity, low cost and integration into mobile devices. The appearance of the new Bluetooth specification, named Bluetooth low energy (BLE), and the emergence of new popular devices that incorporate it, opens the door to new LPS wireless solutions based on BLE. Here, we evaluate the viability of BLE for indoor positioning scenarios. In addition, we develop a framework to analyse, understand and help migrate previous LPS systems, based on other technologies, to BLE. We show experimentally that, with proper configuration of the BLE devices, great performance can be obtained in terms of discovery time and energy consumption. Copyright © 2014 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

Overview and Evaluation of Bluetooth Low Energy: An Emerging Low-Power Wireless Technology

Bluetooth Low Energy (BLE) is an emerging low-power wireless technology developed for short-range control and monitoring applications that is expected to be incorporated into billions of devices in the next few years. This paper describes the main features of BLE, explores its potential applications, and investigates the impact of various critical parameters on its performance. BLE represents a trade-off between energy consumption, latency, piconet size, and throughput that mainly depends on parameters such as connInterval and connSlaveLatency. According to theoretical results, the lifetime of a BLE device powered by a coin cell battery ranges between 2.0 days and 14.1 years. The number of simultaneous slaves per master ranges between 2 and 5,917. The minimum latency for a master to obtain a sensor reading is 676 μs, although simulation results show that, under high bit error rate, average latency increases by up to three orders of magnitude. The paper provides experimental results that complement the theoretical and simulation findings, and indicates implementation constraints that may reduce BLE performance.