Experimental Evaluation of Advertisement-Based Bluetooth Low Energy Communication

Abstract

This paper addresses the efficiency of Bluetooth Low Energy (BLE) communication in a network composed of a large number of tags that transmit information to a single hub using advertisement mode. Theoretical results show that the use of advertisements enables hundreds and thousands of BLE devices to coexist in the same area and at the same time effectively transmit messages. Together with other properties (low power consumption, medium communication range, capability to detect a signal’s angle-of-arrival, etc.), this makes BLE a competing technology for the Internet of Things (IoT) applications. However, as the number of communicating devices increases, the advertisement collision intensifies and the communication performance of BLE drops. This phenomena was so far analyzed theoretically, in simulations and in small-scale experiments, but large-scale experiments are not presented in the literature. This paper complements previous results and presents an experimental evaluation of a real IoT-use case, which is the deployment of over 200 tags communicating using advertisements. We evaluate the impact of the number of advertisements on the effective data reception rate and throughput. Despite the advertisement collision rate in our experiment varying between 0.22 and 0.33, we show that BLE, thanks to the multiple transmission of advertisements, can still ensure acceptable data reception rates and fulfill the requirements of a wide range of IoT applications.

Harvesting-Aware Optimal Communication Scheme for Infrastructure-Less Sensing

“…Collisions with other sensor beacons can therefore be considered minimal when compared to the higher probability of interference from other sources like WiFi or Bluetooth communication [18]. The scalability of BLE advertisement based communication has also been confirmed experimentally in [30]. Reliable communication was demonstrated in a dense deployment with more than 200 sensor nodes within the range of a single receiver.…”

Detecting and Correcting for Human Obstacles in BLE Trilateration Using Artificial Intelligence

“…During each 50 ms scan interval the receiver is measuring one channel and will log RSSI values that are available during that interval. The receiver switches channels every scan interval [28,29]. 1500 samples of RSSI were collected from each transmitter on each of the three channels.…”

Energy Consumption Evaluation of a Routing Protocol for Low-Power and Lossy Networks in Mesh Scenarios for Precision Agriculture

“…Therefore, the energy consumption of each sensor node must be minimized to maximize the network lifetime. Many recent research works were proposed to investigate how to improve the wireless communication, e.g., in BLE [ 10 , 11 ], NB-IoT [ 12 ], and Wi-Fi [ 13 ].…”