AdaptaBLE: Adaptive control of data rate, transmission power, and connection interval in bluetooth low energy

Abstract

This work investigates run-time parameter control for Bluetooth Low Energy (BLE), based on the latest Bluetooth specification 5 released in 2016. Compared to the previous version, Bluetooth specification 5 provides more options for data rate and transmission power and gives room for adaptive parameter control to improve BLE performance in time-varying wireless environments. To the best of our knowledge, this work is the first systematic study of this regime in the research community. We experimentally study how more parameter options in Bluetooth specification 5 impact BLE performance. Based on the preliminary study, we design AdaptaBLE that dynamically adjusts connection interval, data rate, and transmission power together to satisfy quality of service (QoS) requirements without wasting energy. Through extensive performance evaluation on off-the-shelf BLE chips, we show that AdaptaBLE provides stable performance regardless of wireless environments and reduces QoS failures by 5 times with similar energy consumption compared to the state-of-the-art parameter control scheme for BLE.