Performance Evaluation of Bluetooth Low Energy Communication

Abstract

Bluetooth Low Energy (BLE), also known as Bluetooth Smart is the new power efficient version of Bluetooth. With the massive increase in the use of IoT devices, their compatibility and suitability for use with BLE, it has become an important protocol for communication. The performance of the protocol in terms of throughput, however, remains untested. Several parameters like connection interval, packet size per connection interval, data length extension and others constitute the implementation of the BLE protocol on a device. These parameters directly or indirectly effect the throughput of devices communicating over BLE. In this paper, we evaluated BLE performance by performing experiments to calculate throughput with varying values of connection interval and MTU size of application payload. We provide experimental values of throughput and compare it with the theoretically expected results and discuss the pattern and aberration found.