BLE Parameter Optimization for IoT Applications

Bluetooth Low Energy (BLE) has been designed as a power efficient protocol for small portable and autonomous devices, showing its efficiency for connecting these devices with smartphones to periodically and frequently exchange data, like heart rate or notifications. Additionally, BLE is present in almost every smartphone, turning it into perfect ubiquitous remote control for smart homes, buildings or cities. Nevertheless, there is still room to improve BLE performance for typical IoT use cases where battery lifetime should reach several years. In this paper we propose an extension to a model for evaluating BLE performance, latency and energy consumption, in order to provide realistic results based on various scenario conditions. In addition, we propose a parameter optimization of the BLE Neighbor Discovery process, in order to obtain the best performance possible depending on the constraints of specific use cases. Our results on two typical IoT test-cases show that advertiser battery lifetime can be increased up to ~89x (9.55 days to 2.32 years) for a first case, and ~281x (9.55 months to 7.36 years) for a second case.

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