Pontus Arvidson

Performance Evaluation of the Data Transfer Modes in Bluetooth 5

The Bluetooth 5 specification, which introduces new core features such as advertising extensions, additional physical layer transmission modes, and an enhanced frequency hopping scheme, was released in December 2016. As a first step to a complete technology evaluation for Bluetooth 5, this manuscript assesses the performance of the advertising extension feature, compared to the connection-oriented and advertising data transfer approaches available in previous Bluetooth releases. Service ratio, communication delays, and battery lifetime of a network of Bluetooth devices are evaluated by means of computer simulations, considering a home automation use case with a realistic deployment and varying traffic loads. The results show that advertising extension guarantees good performance in terms of all considered indicators, although it suffers from higher losses compared to connections for low traffic loads, and longer delays compared to legacy advertising. Such tradeoffs can be exploited for standardization of future Bluetooth specifications.