A Comprehensive Experimental Evaluation of Radio Irregularity in BLE Networks

Bluetooth Low Energy (BLE) is low-power and widely available. It is one of the dominant wireless technologies used in various Internet of Things applications. Many indoor localization applications use BLE beacons, however, these beacons lack precise distance estimation due to multipath fading, interference, and radio irregularity. Unfortunately, the impact of radio irregularity is often either assumed or neglected in many research studies, which question the applicability of these solutions in real-world scenarios. In this paper, we evaluate the impact of radio irregularity on BLE broadcasting beacons. We conducted extensive hardware experiments in two indoor environments, in all BLE advertisement channels of different BLE hardware, and at different distances and transmit powers. These experiments generate values of degree of irregularity which serve as an input parameter for the radio irregularity model. Our results and reported data sets are of vital importance for developing BLE based studies and simulation tools, particularly for indoor localization applications.