BLE Periodic Advertising-Based Energy-Efficient Sensor Node Operation for Transfer of Large Data in Monitoring Applications

IoT applications like livestock and personalized health care monitoring systems have large amounts of data obtained per second from sensors interfaced to battery operated sensor nodes. In such networks, all the data generated at the nodes must be successfully sent to the central receiving device ensuring minimal power consumption of the data transmission operation, to enable longer lifetimes of battery-operated sensor nodes. In this article, in order to minimize energy consumption of sensor nodes, we propose a Bluetooth low energy (BLE)-based data transfer approach relying on BLE periodic advertisements, which allow up to 255 bytes of payload to be sent in one packet and minimize the involvement of interference prone primary advertising channels in the data transfer process. By using primary channel transmissions only for one-time device discovery and then disabling them, the proposed technique ensures that number of transmissions made by each sensor node for successful data delivery in large sensor networks is reduced in comparison with conventional extended and periodic advertisements. This offers reduction in energy consumption of sensor nodes due to reduction in radio on time. Through extensive real-time and simulation-based experimentation conducted, we have shown that, in a network of 200 sensor nodes, the proposed periodic advertising-based technique requires much lesser radio on time for reliable data delivery and reduces energy consumption of the sensor nodes by almost 51% and 20% as compared to the consumption when extended and standardized periodic advertisements are used to communicate the data, respectively.