Category: Bluetooth LE

Bluetooth Standards Pros and Cons

Here at BeaconZone we create solutions based on products that use Bluetooth LE. The Bluetooth standards are created and maintained by the Bluetooth SIG. This post briefly explores the advantages and disadvantages of such standards and the opportunities and risks of going off-piste using 3rd party wireless standards.

The main advantage of the Bluetooth LE standard is interoperability. We can use beacons, sensor beacons, smartphones, gateways, single board computers such as the Raspberry Pi, laptops and desktops in solutions and be sure they can communicate using Bluetooth LE. More specifically, we can use the Bluetooth APIs on these platforms and they speak a common language and ‘just work’. Bluetooth has also recently introduced standards on top of the Bluetooth LE standard that provide for mesh networking and angle based location.

The Bluetooth LE standard has caused the ecosystem of System on a Chip (SoC) vendors such as Texas Instruments, Nordic Semiconductor and Dialog Semiconductor to create inexpensive sub-systems and SDKs that simplify implementing new products based on the standards. This, in turn, has created a large variety of devices that can talk to each other even though they use hardware from different vendors. The variety of devices has increased competition, keeping device prices down.

The problem with standards is that they evolve very slowly and might not be optimal for specific situations. This creates an opportunity for 3rd parties to create alternative wireless solutions such as Ultra Wideband (UWB) devices, custom mesh networking and custom location schemes that can provide better performance in aspects such as accuracy, physical range and battery life. These custom products cost more because they are more involved to create/manufacture and their unique features can command a higher price. However, there’s the risk that if/when the companies producing these products go out of business, your solution will become end-of-life with no second sourcing. This is a particular risk when the product involves some sort of software as a service (SAAS), irrespective of standards.

Choosing a wireless technology for your solution involves a trade off between performance, cost and risk. It’s wise to first seek a standards-based and stand-alone (not SAAS) approach and only deviate if you find what you need to do isn’t served by available solutions.

Making More Sense of Bluetooth Advertising Scans

When working with Bluetooth beacons and/or gateways and looking at raw Bluetooth data it can often become confusing which device is which. When setting up beacons using manufacturers’ apps, it’s a common occurrence for our customers to mistakenly connect to smartphones or fitness trackers rather than a beacon and wonder why the connection doesn’t work.

RaMBLE is a useful Android app that helps decode the Bluetooth devices around you. It attempts to classify devices so you can identify them:

The scanning runs in background and also logs advertising so that the data can be exported for analysis.

Concurrent Transmission (CT) Bluetooth

There’s new research BlueFlood: Concurrent Transmissions for Multi-Hop
Bluetooth 5 — Modeling and Evaluation (pdf) that looks into using concurrent transmissions (CT) with Bluetooth.

Today’s Bluetooth devices use advertising, GATT connection and mesh. Advertising occurs over three channels to reduce the affects of wireless interference. When more than one device advertises at the same time, the data is lost. However, advertising takes of the order of 1ms so the chance of collision is usually small.

In contrast, BlueFlood uses concurrent transmissions (CT) that purposely synchronise transmissions such that if colliding packets are tightly synchronised and have the same contents, the resulting signal might be distorted, but highly probable that they do not destruct each other. This is used with the Glossy flooding protocol and 40 rather than 3 advertising channels.

CT-based protocols achieve enormous performance gains in terms of end-to-end reliability, latency and energy consumption even under harsh interference conditions

Concurrent transmissions are challenging using Bluetooth because transmissions need to be synchronised down to 250ns. Nevertheless, the researchers show this is possible using standard Bluetooth PHY and commercial Nordic SoCs. They achieved an end-to-end loss rate below 1% and managed to receive the signals on a standard smartphone. While the mechanism was fragile it was found to be viable.

Bluetooth Technical Resources

Silicon Labs is a Bluetooth module manufacturer and solutions provider. Over the years they have created a large number of useful technical notes. They have just created a master list that allows easier access to the notes. Here are some that more general, less proprietary and not specific to Silicon Labs’ modules:

Bluetooth advertising data basics

Bluetooth Tx power settings

Throughput with Bluetooth Low Energy technology

Bluetooth advertising using manufacturer specific data

BLE Basics (master/slave, GATT client/server, data RX/TX)

Understanding the Bluetooth Connection Process

Bluetooth Mesh Training resources

Low Power Bluetooth Advertising Chip Without SoC

Asahi Kasei Microdevices Corporation has announced the AK1595. As with the previously mentioned AK1594, it works without a System on a Chip and provides Bluetooth transmission using very low power.

Instead of setting the advertising via EEPROM programming like the AK1594, the AK1595 is controlled via UART or I2C making it suitable for variable data transmission scenarios.

We expect the AK1595 will be particularly useful for energy harvested applications.

Bluetooth Low Energy in Noisy RF Environments

Michael Spork, Carlo Alberto Boano and Kay Romer of the Institute for Technical Informatics, Graz University of Technology, Austria have a recent paper on Improving the Timeliness of Bluetooth Low Energy in Noisy RF Environments.

The paper looks into the affect of radio frequency (RF) noise on connection based Bluetooth LE communication and provides a mechanism that significantly improves the time taken to send a message in noisy environments. To be clear, beacon-related scenarios rarely use GATT connection based communication and instead use connection-less communication repeatedly broadcasting short packets on 3 advertisement channels (37, 38, and 39). Connection tends to be used only to set up beacon parameters or for more advanced scenarios where a device such as a smartphone connects to the beacon for bidirectional data transfer to get real time data, for example, more timely motion detection.

The authors distinguish their research as experimentally derived as opposed to analytic (just using calculations). They show how the Bluetooth Adaptive Frequency Hopping (AFH) algorithm allows Bluetooth devices to blacklist interfered channels and re-transmit packets on different frequencies until interference is avoided.

The paper shows how the AFH algorithm mitigates the effects of Wi-Fi interference near a Bluetooth master by blacklisting channels. An interesting insight is that the master is unable to detect Wi-Fi interference near the Bluetooth slave and is unable to adapt resulting in UDP messages being significantly delayed.

“Our experiments show that BLE connections are eventually able to successfully transmit all data packets, even under heavy Wi-Fi or Bluetooth interference”

The authors demonstrate that by lowering the connection interval in response to changes in the link quality, an application can reduced the average number of packets delayed from 6.18% to 0.54%.

Read about Bluetooth LE on the Factory Floor

What is Bluetooth Beacon Technology?

Bluetooth beacons use Bluetooth LE, a low power version of Bluetooth to repeatedly send out a short amount of data typically up to 50m but in some cases hundreds of metres. The data usually includes an identifier in various standard formats such as iBeacon or Eddystone. It can also include sensor data.

The beacon advertising can be picked up by other Bluetooth LE devices such as smartphones, WiFi gateways to send to a server and single board computers such as the Raspberry Pi.

The key features are:

  • Low power and hence can work for up to years on battery power
  • Interoperability with a large number of other Bluetooth LE devices
  • The underlying Bluetooth LE protocol is resilient to electrical interference
  • Sensing without the need for soldering or custom electronics

To learn more about the physical aspects of beacons and the actual advertising, see our article on What are Beacons?

Read more about beacons for IoT sensing.

Bluetooth Range Estimator

The Bluetooth SIG, who create the specifications for Bluetooth, have a new Bluetooth Range Estimator that takes into account the environment, transmit power, antenna gain and received gain to provide an estimated range.

There’s also an associated blog post on 3 Common Myths About Bluetooth.

In terms of beacons, the range usually relates to how they are powered. The beacons with smaller CR2032 batteries tend to be designed for ranges up 50m. Larger CR2477 powered beacons usually reach about 100m. AA battery beacons or those with power amplifers reach hundreds of metres. and some USB beacons can reach up to 4Km. These ranges are outdoors. Indoors, there’s often radio reflections and blocking that reduce range. Beacon orientation can also affect range.

Bluetooth 5 Packet Sniffing

When testing beacons and Bluetooth LE, nRF Connect is usually sufficient. However, if you need deeper analysis of Bluetooth you need to use a packet sniffer.

NCC Group has a new open source sniffer for Bluetooth 5 that also works with Bluetooth 4.x. You need to run the software on a Texas Instruments (TI) CC26x2 board.

The source code and instructions are available on GitHub.