sensors Article Efficient Communication Scheme for Bluetooth Low Energy in Large Scale Applications Maciej Nikodem 1,* , Mariusz Slabicki 2 and Marek Bawiec 1 1 Faculty of Electronics, Wrocław University of Science and Technology, Wybrzeze˙ Wyspia´nskiego27, 50-370 Wrocław, Poland;
[email protected] 2 Institute of Theoretical and Applied Informatics, Polish Academy of Sciences, ul. Bałtycka 5, 44-100 Gliwice, Poland;
[email protected] * Correspondence:
[email protected] Received: 14 October 2020; Accepted: 4 November 2020; Published: 8 November 2020 Abstract: The use of Bluetooth Low Energy (BLE) in the Internet-of-Things (IoT) applications has become widespread and popular. This has resulted in the increased number of deployed BLE devices. To ensure energy efficiency, applications use connectionless communication where nodes broadcast information using advertisement messages. As the BLE devices compete for access to spectrum, collisions are inevitable and methods that improve device coexistence are required. This paper proposes a connectionless communication scheme for BLE that improves communication efficiency in IoT applications where a large number of BLE nodes operate in the same area and communicate simultaneously to a central server. The proposed scheme is based on an active scanning mode and is compared with a typical application where passive scanning mode is used. The evaluation is based on numerical simulations and real-life evaluation of a network containing 150 devices. The presented scheme significantly reduces the number of messages transmitted by each node and decreases packet loss ratio. It also improves the energy efficiency and preserves the battery of BLE nodes as they transmit fewer radio messages and effectively spent less time actively communicating.