Design and Practical Evaluation of a Family of Lightweight Protocols for Heterogeneous Sensing through BLE Beacons in IoT Telemetry Applications

Abstract

The Internet of Things (IoT) involves a wide variety of heterogeneous technologies and resource-constrained devices that interact with each other. Due to such constraints, IoT devices usually require lightweight protocols that optimize the use of resources and energy consumption. Among the different commercial IoT devices, Bluetooth and Bluetooth Low Energy (BLE)-based beacons, which broadcast periodically certain data packets to notify their presence, have experienced a remarkable growth, specially due to their application in indoor positioning systems. This article proposes a family of protocols named Lightweight Protocol for Sensors (LP4S) that provides fast responses and enables plug-and-play mechanisms that allow IoT telemetry systems to discover new nodes and to describe and auto-register the sensors and actuators connected to a beacon. Thus, three protocols are defined depending on the beacon hardware characteristics: LP4S-6 (for resource-constraint beacons), LP4S-X (for more powerful beacons) and LP4S-J (for beacons able to run complex firmware). In order to demonstrate the capabilities of the designed protocols, the most restrictive (LP4S-6) is tested after implementing it for a telemetry application in a beacon based on Eddystone (Google’s open beacon format). Thus, the beacon specification is extended in order to increase its ability to manage unlimited sensors in a telemetry system without interfering in its normal operation with Eddystone frames. The performed experiments show the feasibility of the proposed solution and its superiority, in terms of latency and energy consumption, with respect to approaches based on Generic Attribute Profile (GATT) when multiple users connect to a mote or in scenarios where latency is not a restriction, but where low-energy consumption is essential.

Towards Next Generation Teaching, Learning, and Context-Aware Applications for Higher Education: A Review on Blockchain, IoT, Fog and Edge Computing Enabled Smart Campuses and Universities

“…Smart campuses and universities require an IT infrastructure similar to the one needed by smart cities, smart buildings, or smart homes, which make use of Internet of Things (IoT) solutions [1][2][3][4] to interact with the sensor and actuation systems of a university. Similarly to smart cities, but in contrast to most smart homes and buildings, smart campuses must provide long-distance communications, as many university campuses cover an area that can reach thousands of square meters.…”

Towards The Internet of Smart Clothing: A Review on IoT Wearables and Garments for Creating Intelligent Connected E-Textiles

“…However, when longer reading distances are required, certain communications technologies can be re-purposed to provide, at the same time, identification and a communications channel. Examples of such technologies are Bluetooth Low Energy (BLE) or WiFi, which have been demonstrated to be useful in diverse identification and tracking applications [82][83][84] and can easily reach between 50 and 100 m in real-scenarios.…”

A Fog Computing and Cloudlet Based Augmented Reality System for the Industry 4.0 Shipyard

“…Industry 4.0 is aimed at changing the way modern factories operate thanks to the application of some of the latest technologies associated with the Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT) [ 1 ], Big Data [ 2 ] or robotics [ 3 ]. Some Industry 4.0 technologies are already mature, but others are still being studied by manufacturers and academia for their application in industrial environments [ 4 , 5 , 6 , 7 , 8 , 9 ]. One of such technologies is Augmented Reality (AR), which, although it is based on different pioneering works performed in the 1960s [ 10 , 11 ], it was not until the late 1990s that it was actually pushed by academia [ 12 ] and by the industry (in this latter case, thanks to the support of the German government [ 13 , 14 ]).…”