Abstract
Bluetooth Low Energy (BLE) has emerged as a prominent low-power communication protocol for Internet of Things (IoT) devices due to its affordability, simplicity, efficiency, and compatibility with mobile platforms. We consider the use of advertisements, small periodic packets broadcast by BLE devices, as a potentially useful transport for sensor network data, worthy of deeper investigation. In this paper, we analyze a network paradigm, which facilitates communication between IoT devices and gateways through BLE advertisements—an approach suitable for low-power devices due to its simplicity and compatibility with existing BLE stacks. To understand the behavior of such BLE advertisement networks, we derive and empirically validate analytical models to predict their performance. We also evaluate real-world deployments of BLE advertisement networks, first exploring a dataset from a prior deployment of BLE sensors accounting for over 600 sensed days across multiple locations. We show that with redundancy and suitable gateway hardware, BLE advertisements can be used to create a network achieving 99% data reception, and with a dynamic adaptation protocol, can do so in networks with varying contention. We design and deploy our own advertisement networks that incorporate our models, demonstrating that they can predict average network performance, that advertisements can be used as the base for a reliable network, and that BLE advertisement networks may prove to be a valuable tool for the sensor network community.
| Original language | English (US) |
|---|---|
| Journal | International Conference on Embedded Wireless Systems and Networks |
| State | Published - 2022 |
| Event | International Conference on Embedded Wireless Systems and Networks, EWSN 2022 - Linz, Austria Duration: Oct 3 2022 → Oct 5 2022 |
Funding
10 Acknowledgments This work was supported in part by the CONIX Research Center, one of six centers in JUMP, a Semiconductor Research Corporation (SRC) program sponsored by DARPA. This material is based upon work supported by the U.S. Department of Energy’s Office of Energy Efficiency and Renewable Energy (EERE) under the award number DE-EE0008220. This work is also supported by the National Science Foundation under grants CNS-1824277, CNS-1822332, and DGE-1256260. We thank Sam DeBruin and Pat Pannuto for their invaluable support with this work, and the reviewers for their feedback.
Keywords
- Adaptation
- Advertisement Network
- BLE
- Deployment
ASJC Scopus subject areas
- Computer Networks and Communications
- Information Systems
- Electrical and Electronic Engineering