On the system-level performance evaluation of bluetooth 5 in IoT: Open office case study

Abstract

The Internet of Things (IoT) has recently revolutionized the concept of connectivity from humans to surrounding objects through the Internet infrastructure. To Enable the wide range of IoT use cases, several communication technologies are introduced. Among the others, short range radio technology is an essential part of IoT for enabling the local area networks. Bluetooth Low Energy (BLE) version 5 is recently developed by Bluetooth Special Interest Group (SIG) which claims to be better suit for IoT use cases. However, the complexity of BLE 5 protocol and the lack of system-level simulator hinder the detailed analytical study of this new technology. To this end, we develop comprehensive system-level tool for simulating BLE 5. Some of the most important features of BLE 5 are developed and results are investigated in this paper. We investigate the BLE 5 with new physical (PHY) layer from networking perspective by analyzing end-to-end delay, battery life time, packet error rate and throughput in open office environment. To this end, we investigate the scalability of the network for different PHYs. The results show that, in this case study, the coded PHYs have weaker performance when network becomes congested.