BLE-Based Cooperative Awareness for Miniature UAVs: Simulation and Experimental Analysis

Cooperative Awareness (CA) is an integral part of Intelligent Transport Systems (ITSs) standardized by the European Telecommunications Standards Institute (ETSI) and targeted to ensure safe and efficient transportation in the future. Miniature uncrewed aerial vehicles (UAVs) have been widely utilized in various applications due to their ever-increasing functionalities. Thus, it is a matter of time until the need to integrate them into ITS and human-centric communication ecosystems arises. To enable the benefits of ITS to miniature UAVs, in this article, a low-cost, low-power, novel UAV-CA Message (CAM) scheme for indoor and outdoor based on Bluetooth Low Energy (BLE) radio access technology is introduced. Furthermore, a proof-of-concept implementation is developed for this BLE-based UAV-CAM, and its performance is investigated using analytical, experimental, and simulation methods. Notably, both the performance for CA over BLE4 legacy advertising and the extended advertising introduced in BLE5 are reported. Our results demonstrate that BLE is able to produce a power-efficient, scalable solution with sufficient range capabilities while keeping up with the traffic requirements of CAM.