Modeling and performance analysis of device discovery in Bluetooth Low Energy networks

Bluetooth Low Energy (BT LE) is a low power air interface technology recently released by the Bluetooth Special Interest Group (BT SIG). As a promising radio, BT LE realizes many designing features to fulfill foreseeable requirements of short range communication, such as fast device discovery, power-saving transmitting, encryption and authentication, etc. In this paper, we focus on the modeling and performance analyzing of the device discovery process in BT LE networks. A general model for device discovery on multi-channel is proposed primarily, which is then tailored and simplified for the BT LE case, where three broadcasting channels are used. Via theoretical analysis, our study reveals that some potential pitfalls are residing in the current version of BT LE specification, i.e. improper parameter settings can significantly deteriorate the device discovery latency and increase meaningless energy consumption. We accordingly propose several strategies seeking ways to tackle the problem. The results of extensive simulation show that our strategies can largely reduce undesirable latency and effectively improve the efficiency of device discovery in BT LE networks.