Efficient Communication Scheme for Bluetooth Low Energy in Large Scale Applications

Area of Science:

• Wireless communication
• Internet-of-Things (IoT)
• Low-power electronics

Background:

• Bluetooth Low Energy (BLE) is widely used in IoT applications, leading to a high density of devices.
• Connectionless communication via advertisement messages is crucial for BLE energy efficiency.
• Spectrum competition among BLE devices causes inevitable collisions, necessitating improved coexistence strategies.

Purpose of the Study:

• To propose and evaluate a novel connectionless communication scheme for BLE to enhance efficiency in dense IoT deployments.
• To compare the proposed active scanning scheme against the traditional passive scanning mode.
• To address challenges of simultaneous communication from numerous BLE nodes to a central server.

Main Methods:

• Development of a connectionless BLE communication scheme utilizing active scanning.
• Comparative analysis against a passive scanning approach.
• Validation through numerical simulations and real-world testing with a 150-device network.

Main Results:

• The proposed scheme significantly reduces the number of transmitted messages per node.
• A notable decrease in packet loss ratio was observed.
• Enhanced energy efficiency and battery preservation for BLE nodes due to reduced active communication time.

Conclusions:

• The developed connectionless BLE scheme effectively improves communication efficiency and device coexistence for dense IoT applications.
• The scheme offers negligible implementation complexity and cost.
• Applicable to diverse IoT scenarios operating in the 2.4 GHz band, enhancing overall performance and interoperability.