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Bluetooth Low Energy in Sensor and Actuator Networks

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A special issue of Journal of Sensor and Actuator Networks (ISSN 2224-2708). This special issue belongs to the section "Actuators, Sensors and Devices".

Deadline for manuscript submissions: closed (15 February 2021) | Viewed by 13124

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Special Issue Editor

Dr. Atis Elsts

E-Mail Website
Guest Editor

Institute of Electronics and Computer Science (EDI), Dzerbenes str. 14 Riga LV-1006, Latvia
Interests: Internet of Things; activity detection; low-power wireless, embedded systems; tsch; 6tisch; wearables

Special Issue Information

Dear Colleagues,

Bluetooth low energy (BLE) has emerged as the most popular low-power wireless technology due to its ubiquity in smartphones and other consumer devices. However, to fully utilize the potential of BLE in sensor and actuator networks, further work is necessary that builds on the existing BLE standards.

This Special Issue targets scientific contributions addressing applications of BLE technology to topics relevant to the wider sensor network community. This includes novel applications of BLE, such as applications in Industry 4.0, healthcare and fitness, including privacy-preserving applications in contact tracing relevant to COVID-19 and other infectious diseases, and body area networks that utilize BLE for communication. We also welcome research articles that address the challenges and opportunities created by recently published or upcoming standards such as BLE 5, Bluetooth Mesh, 6BLEMesh, including description of tools and software such as network simulators that incorporate aspects of these standards. Last but not least, the issue welcomes research on making BLE networks more resilient, energy-efficient, secure and safe, accurately time-synchronized, and able to supply accurate information about the location of each device.

Topics of interest for this Special Issue include but are not limited to the following:

Bluetooth 5 networks;
Bluetooth low energy applications;
Bluetooth Mesh networks and 6BLEMesh networks;
Body Area Networks with BLE;
Coexistence of BLE and other wireless technologies;
Contact tracing via BLE communication;
Deployments of BLE networks;
Energy-efficient communication in BLE networks;
Experimental measurements of BLE communication;
Industrial applications of BLE networks;
Localization in BLE networks;
Mobility in BLE networks;
Parameter selection for BLE networks;
Radio module and antenna design for BLE applications;
Security in BLE networks;
Simulators for BLE networks;
Synchronous transmissions in BLE networks;
TDMA communication in BLE networks;
Time slotted channel hopping in BLE networks;
Time synchronization in BLE networks.

Dr. Atis Elsts
Guest Editor

Manuscript Submission Information

Manuscripts should be submitted online at www.mdpi.com by registering and logging in to this website. Once you are registered, click here to go to the submission form. Manuscripts can be submitted until the deadline. All submissions that pass pre-check are peer-reviewed. Accepted papers will be published continuously in the journal (as soon as accepted) and will be listed together on the special issue website. Research articles, review articles as well as short communications are invited. For planned papers, a title and short abstract (about 100 words) can be sent to the Editorial Office for announcement on this website.

Submitted manuscripts should not have been published previously, nor be under consideration for publication elsewhere (except conference proceedings papers). All manuscripts are thoroughly refereed through a single-blind peer-review process. A guide for authors and other relevant information for submission of manuscripts is available on the Instructions for Authors page. Journal of Sensor and Actuator Networks is an international peer-reviewed open access semimonthly journal published by MDPI.

Please visit the Instructions for Authors page before submitting a manuscript. The Article Processing Charge (APC) for publication in this open access journal is 2000 CHF (Swiss Francs). Submitted papers should be well formatted and use good English. Authors may use MDPI's English editing service prior to publication or during author revisions.

Keywords

BLE
bluetooth low energy
low-power wireless
localization
sensor networks
Internet of Things

Published Papers (3 papers)

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Research

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24 pages, 1687 KiB

Open AccessFeature PaperArticle

QoS Enabled Heterogeneous BLE Mesh Networks

by Subho Shankar Basu, Mathias Baert and Jeroen Hoebeke

J. Sens. Actuator Netw. 2021, 10(2), 24; https://doi.org/10.3390/jsan10020024 - 28 Mar 2021

Cited by 8 | Viewed by 3324

Abstract

Bluetooth Low Energy (BLE) is a widely known short-range wireless technology used for various Internet of Things (IoT) applications. Recently, with the introduction of BLE mesh networks, this short-range barrier of BLE has been overcome. However, the added advantage of an extended range can come at the cost of a lower performance of these networks in terms of latency, throughput and reliability, as the core operation of BLE mesh is based on advertising and packet flooding. Hence, efficient management of the system is required to achieve a good performance of these networks and a smoother functioning in dense scenarios. As the number of configuration points in a standard mesh network is limited, this paper describes a novel set of standard compliant Quality of Service (QoS) extensions for BLE mesh networks. The resulting QoS features enable better traffic management in the mesh network, providing sufficient redundancy to achieve reliability whilst avoiding unnecessary packet flooding to reduce collisions, as well as the prioritization of certain traffic flows and the ability to control end-to-end latencies. The QoS-based system has been implemented and validated in a small-scale BLE mesh network and compared against a setup without any QoS support. The assessment in a small-scale test setup confirms that applying our QoS features can enhance these types of non-scheduled and random access networks in a significant way. Full article

(This article belongs to the Special Issue Bluetooth Low Energy in Sensor and Actuator Networks)

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21 pages, 3543 KiB

Open AccessFeature PaperArticle

Bluetooth Low Energy Wireless Sensor Network Library in MATLAB Simulink

by Rolands Shavelis and Kaspars Ozols

J. Sens. Actuator Netw. 2020, 9(3), 38; https://doi.org/10.3390/jsan9030038 - 13 Aug 2020

Cited by 2 | Viewed by 4289

Abstract

The paper describes the elements of the developed MATLAB Simulink library for building the models of Bluetooth Low Energy (BLE) wireless sensor networks to simulate the communication between BLE devices in the presence of interference and channel noise. Various parameters can be configured for the devices including their 2D positions to take into account the distances between them for calculating the attenuation coefficients of the transmitted signals. Two simulation examples are provided, one of which demonstrates the data exchange between one master device and one slave at high data packet transmission rate (2 kHz), while the other example shows the data exchange between one master and multiple slaves simultaneously, in which case the data packet transmission rate can be no larger than 133 Hz. Full article

(This article belongs to the Special Issue Bluetooth Low Energy in Sensor and Actuator Networks)

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Review

Jump to: Research

17 pages, 3577 KiB

Open AccessReview

Bluetooth Communication Leveraging Ultra-Low Power Radio Design

by Omar Abdelatty, Xing Chen, Abdullah Alghaihab and David Wentzloff

J. Sens. Actuator Netw. 2021, 10(2), 31; https://doi.org/10.3390/jsan10020031 - 26 Apr 2021

Cited by 5 | Viewed by 4528

Abstract

Energy-efficient wireless connectivity plays an important role in scaling both battery-less and battery-powered Internet-of-Things (IoT) devices. The power consumption in these devices is dominated by the wireless transceivers which limit the battery’s lifetime. Different strategies have been proposed to tackle these issues both in physical and network layers. The ultimate goal is to lower the power consumption without sacrificing other important metrics like latency, transmission range and robust operation under the presence of interference. Joint efforts in designing energy-efficient wireless protocols and low-power radio architectures result in achieving sub-100 μW operation. One technique to lower power is back-channel (BC) communication which allows ultra-low power (ULP) receivers to communicate efficiently with commonly used wireless standards like Bluetooth Low-Energy (BLE) while utilizing the already-deployed infrastructure. In this paper, we present a review of BLE back-channel communication and its forms. Additionally, a comprehensive survey of ULP radio design trends and techniques in both Bluetooth transmitters and receivers is presented. Full article

(This article belongs to the Special Issue Bluetooth Low Energy in Sensor and Actuator Networks)

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