Experimental Evaluation of Advertisement-Based Bluetooth Low Energy Communication

Area of Science:

• Wireless Communication
• Internet of Things (IoT)
• Network Performance

Background:

• Bluetooth Low Energy (BLE) is a competing technology for IoT applications due to its low power consumption and other features.
• Increasing numbers of BLE devices in a network lead to intensified advertisement collisions, degrading communication performance.
• Previous analyses of BLE advertisement collisions were primarily theoretical, simulated, or small-scale.

Purpose of the Study:

• To experimentally evaluate the efficiency of BLE communication in a large-scale network using advertisement mode.
• To assess the impact of advertisement collisions on data reception rate and throughput in a real-world IoT scenario.
• To validate the suitability of BLE for IoT applications with a high density of devices.

Main Methods:

• Conducted a large-scale experiment involving over 200 BLE tags transmitting data to a single hub using advertisement mode.
• Monitored and analyzed the effective data reception rate and throughput under varying numbers of advertisements.
• Quantified the advertisement collision rate within the experimental setup.

Main Results:

• Advertisement collision rates in the experiment ranged from 0.22 to 0.33.
• Despite collisions, BLE demonstrated acceptable data reception rates.
• The findings indicate BLE can meet the requirements of various IoT applications even with numerous devices.

Conclusions:

• BLE communication remains viable for large-scale IoT deployments despite inherent advertisement collision challenges.
• The multiple transmissions of advertisements by BLE devices contribute to maintaining acceptable performance.
• This study provides crucial experimental data for the practical application of BLE in dense IoT environments.