Study of Received Signal Strength Indicator values of Bluetooth Low Energy in Test Environment and Simulation

Internet of Things (IoT) technologies are actively growing and finding ever wider application in various areas of life. One of the most common and used IoT technology in various small-sized devices is Bluetooth Low Energy (BLE). The technology has various applications, one of which is determining the location of nodes in the network based on the Received Signal Strength Indicator (RSSI) values. This paper presents an investigation of RSSI values in a real BLE network with Texas Instruments and Arduino end nodes, as well as in simulation. Based on the experiments, a comparison was made between the reported RSSI values and recommendations were formulated describing the cases in which to use the considered end nodes in a real network and the simulator.