AdaptaBLE: Data Rate and Transmission Power Adaptation for Bluetooth Low Energy

Abstract

The use of Bluetooth Low Energy (BLE) has been steadily increased since Bluetooth Special Interest Group (SIG) standardized BLE in 2010, and BLE performance has been improved owing to various studies. Bluetooth specification 4.2 defined only one data rate, i.e., 1 Mb/s. However, the specification 5 released in 2016 specifies 2 Mb/s and coded PHYs for higher throughput and more stable transmission, respectively. This version also allows the transmission power to be varied from -20 dBm to 20 dBm. Therefore we are enabled to use various data rates and transmission powers in BLE. However, no research has studied how to adapt these yet. In this paper, we propose an algorithm, termed AdaptaBLE, that selects data rate and transmission power of BLE by considering link stability and energy consumption. We implement AdaptaBLE on real devices and measure its performance. As a result, we confirm that AdaptaBLE successfully selects an appropriate TX power and data rate while keeping the BLE link stable.