A practical study on Bluetooth Low Energy (BLE) throughput

The data rate of Bluetooth Low Energy (BLE) is 1Mbps, and 2Mbps for BLE 4.2 and BLE 5, respectively. However, the throughput of a BLE system would be much lower since we need to account for various protocol overheads, adaptive RF connection adjustments for maintaining robust links amid interference, and protocol limitations based on BLE data exchange strategy and operations such as connection intervals, packet size and packet acknowledgment scheme. In this paper, we practically investigate the maximum throughput achievable in a simple BLE 4.2 network of two nodes, used in a data logging application. In this type of application, one node always has data to transmit and the other node which collects the transmitted sensor data does not have any data to send. We will also consider the effect of BLE parameters in this study. The result of our study shows that the maximum amount of throughput is 221.7 kbps for this application under the condition that the wireless link is error free and application always has data to transmit.