PERFORMANCE ASSESSMENT OF BLUETOOTH LOW ENERGY

Abstract

For a vast range of uses, lightweight, portable and integrated sensors are a prevalent technology in daily life. Wireless transmission plays a key role in this sense, and Bluetooth Low Energy (BLE) is gaining more and more prominence among the solutions available. BLE merges together strong efficiency, low-energy consumption and widespread diffusion. The goal of this work is to examine the key methodologies used to investigate BLE efficiency. An in-depth overview of the protocol, outlining the key aspects and implementation specifics, is the first section of this analysis. The second section discusses the state of the art with respect to BLE functionality and performance. In specific, throughput, maximum number of connectable sensors, power usage, latency and maximum reachable range are evaluated in order to define the existing BLE technology limits. The key findings can be summarized as follows: technically, the output can exceed the ~230 kbps limit, but the real implementations tested in this analysis reveal that the outputs are limited to ~100 kbps; the maximum reachable range depends solely on the radio capacity, and goes up to a few tens of meters; The maximum number of nodes in the network depends on the parameters of the connection, the design of the network and the particular features of the system, although it is generally less than 10; power consumption and latency are mostly modelled and evaluated, based strictly on a broad number of parameters. Much of these functions are focused on analytical simulations, but to grasp the exact boundaries, there is a need for rigorous experimental assessments.