Efficient Advertiser Discovery in Bluetooth Low Energy Devices

Abstract

Bluetooth Low Energy (BLE) has become ubiquitous in the majority of mobile devices that connect wirelessly. With the increase in the number of devices, the probability of congestion also increases in a network. Data channels of the BLE use frequency hopping, but it is not available for advertising channels. The capability of the BLE for providing a wide range of parameters settings ensures the impressive potential for BLE devices to customize their discovery latency. But communication before connection setup is not synchronous and both the scanning devices and the advertising devices are unaware of the timing parameters of each other. This can lead to inefficient advertiser device discovery. To resolve this issue, an algorithm is proposed to reduce the average latency per advertiser experienced due to the increase in the number of BLE devices in a vicinity. It is observed that the average latency has shown improvement in the range of 35% to 55%, depending on different simulated scenarios. Due to this improvement the overall energy consumption is also reduced.