There’s new research on predicting the channel access of Bluetooth Low Energy (BLE) devices conducted by a team from Silicon Austria Labs GmbH and Johannes Kepler University in Austria. The team aimed to estimate the channels used by multiple BLE connections by passively listening to the channel, with the goal of predicting future channel access to avoid collisions in other wireless networks.
The hardware setup for this research consisted of six Nordic NRF52840 BLE devices that formed three BLE connection pairs, and one sniffer based on the Ubertooth One. This setup allowed the researchers to actively monitor and analyse the BLE channel.
Channel hopping over time
The researchers demonstrated that by passively listening they could reconstruct channel access algorithms for multiple BLE connections in parallel. This approach can be used in new applications to avoid collisions in wireless networks, particularly in applications with high reliability requirements.