On the Feasibility and Optimization of Providing Delay Sensitive Services Based on Bluetooth Low Energy Advertising Technology

Low-cost, short-range, distributed communication technologies have been widely used to provide wireless-related applications in our daily life. Specifically, Bluetooth Low Energy (BLE) is one of the most popular wireless interfaces available in almost all end-user devices. Considering service popularity for unknown users (the general public), the connectionless mode based on BLE advertising technology is highly desirable, because it does not require the device address for connection setup. Among connectionless applications, some services, such as proximity warning, collision warning and entrance detection, are delay sensitive relying on the reception latency of a message. However, the reception performance of BLE connectionless transmissions is highly environmentally dependent, and is influenced by various factors. Hence, the reception latency is a random variable depending on the propagation environment and system parameters. To investigate the feasibility of providing delay sensitive services based on BLE advertising technology, we study the outage performance of connectionless transmissions under a message delivery latency constraint. We model the outage events and derive the outage probability of a delay sensitive service based on BLE advertising technology, taking into consideration the related BLE system parameters and the packet detection probability of the environment. In addition, some outage probability lower bounds and the essential conditions for ensuring good outage performance are presented for performance investigation. From the viewpoint of system optimization, BLE parameter setting and the tradeoff between energy consumption and outage performance are studied based on the numerical results.