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

Abstract

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.

A State-of-the-Art Survey of Indoor Positioning and Navigation Systems and Technologies

“…Bluetooth is a wireless technology that is used for short-range data exchange and Wireless Personal Area Network (WPAN) (Mautz, 2012;Gomez, Oller, & Paradells, 2012;Y. Wang, Yang, Zhao, Liu, & Cuthbert, 2013).…”

“…Wang, Yang, Zhao, Liu, & Cuthbert, 2013). Gomez et al (2012), Y. Wang et al (2013), Rida, Liu, Jadi, Algawhari, and Askourih (2015) and Zhuang, Yang, Li, Qi, and El-Sheimy (2016), among other researchers, have used mobile WPAN that utilise the RSS feature in a couple of implementations that include positioning.…”

“…The mobile phone is the most popular and widely used mobile device in this information age (Goggin, 2012;Dinh, Lee, Niyato, & Ping, 2013). By comparing it with contemporary analogue phones possessing limited audio exchange functionality in fixed locations, it was discovered that multi-functional mobile phones, known as 'smartphones', are fast becoming irreplaceable devices (Reddy et al, 2010;Goggin, 2012;Dinh et al, 2013).…”

Energy-efficient peer-to-peer networking for constrained-capacity mobile environments

“…Also limited battery life affects the above mentioned features through strict energy saving requirements (Vergara & Tehrani 2013, Hoque et al 2015. The use of sleep modes, for example, may significantly increase network latencies (Jurdak et al 2010, Gomez et al 2012, Ayoub et al 2011. However, major differences in the hardware capacity between peer nodes pose even a more substantial challenge for the P2P network functionality than the limited hardware capacity itself would inflict (Rao et al 2003, Kim & Park 2006.…”

“…The studies showed that the energy consumption of ZigBee in idle state ranges from 52µW (120s sleep interval) to 1.45mW (5s sleep interval), the active state consumption is around 31mW, and data transfer consumption ranges from 3.3 to 9 µJ per byte when throughput varies between 8 bit/s and 80 kbit/s. Bluetooth Low Energy (BLE) is a low energy version of Bluetooth, specified in version 4.0 , Bluetooth 2014, Gomez et al 2012. The specification includes PHY layer, link layer (LL), logical link control and adaptation protocol (L2CAP), generic attribute protocol (GATT) and generic access profile (GAP) protocols.…”