Enhancing Adaptive Frequency Hopping for Bluetooth Low Energy

The quality of Bluetooth Low Energy (BLE) connections can be improved by deactivating wireless channels when external interference is detected. The BLE standard contains basic requirements to implement this behavior. However, it does not specify how channels should be classified and disabled, leaving the details up to the implementations. In this paper, an implementation is presented and evaluated, based partially on existing work. A new algorithm for re-activating channels that were previously disabled in order to allow for operation in dynamic environments with changing background interference is proposed and demonstrated to deliver improvements over existing work, resulting in better connection stability. Finally, an evaluation under real-world conditions confirms the improvements to BLE connections that were previously only shown in controlled testing environments.