Sensors 2012, 12(9), 11734-11753; https://doi.org/10.3390/s120911734
Overview and Evaluation of Bluetooth Low Energy: An Emerging Low-Power Wireless Technology
1
Universitat Politècnica de Catalunya/Fundació i2Cat, C/Esteve Terradas, 7, Castelldefels 08860, Spain
2
Universitat Politècnica de Catalunya/Fundació i2Cat, C/Jordi Girona, 1-3, Barcelona 08034, Spain
*
Author to whom correspondence should be addressed.
Received: 26 June 2012 / Revised: 24 July 2012 / Accepted: 14 August 2012 / Published: 29 August 2012
(This article belongs to the Section Sensor Networks)
Abstract
Bluetooth Low Energy (BLE) is an emerging low-power wireless technology developed for short-range control and monitoring applications that is expected to be incorporated into billions of devices in the next few years. This paper describes the main features of BLE, explores its potential applications, and investigates the impact of various critical parameters on its performance. BLE represents a trade-off between energy consumption, latency, piconet size, and throughput that mainly depends on parameters such as connInterval and connSlaveLatency. According to theoretical results, the lifetime of a BLE device powered by a coin cell battery ranges between 2.0 days and 14.1 years. The number of simultaneous slaves per master ranges between 2 and 5,917. The minimum latency for a master to obtain a sensor reading is 676 µs, although simulation results show that, under high bit error rate, average latency increases by up to three orders of magnitude. The paper provides experimental results that complement the theoretical and simulation findings, and indicates implementation constraints that may reduce BLE performance. View Full-TextKeywords:
Bluetooth Low Energy; sensor networks; Internet of Things
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MDPI and ACS Style
Gomez, C.; Oller, J.; Paradells, J. Overview and Evaluation of Bluetooth Low Energy: An Emerging Low-Power Wireless Technology. Sensors 2012, 12, 11734-11753.