Comparing the energy requirements of current bluetooth smart solutions (February 2016)

Bluetooth has become a popular way to get access to data delivered by sensors and beacons. To be convenient in use and low cost in maintenance, those sensors and beacons should consume as less energy as possible. Near the energy consideration of the sensing elements, the proper selection of the Bluetooth Low Energy radio and software stack is vital to achieve low power consumption.  There are several solutions on the market, with various claims with regard to power consumption. These claims are not easy to verify on the basis of the data sheets alone, making it long and difficult for engineers to choose the appropriate solutions. We have measured the energy consumption of several Bluetooth Smart solutions that can be found on the market today. The measurements were based on the important communication phases and the information available in various documents (datasheets, application notes). The result of that work is presented here. This work was done at the end of 2015 and early in 2016

Low-cost test measurement setup for real IoT BLE sensor device characterization

The methodology presented in this paper aims to characterize impairments shown by real devices which are usually neglected on standardized tests but that become very important in massive IoT scenarios. For instance, we have measured that real BLE scanners are not able to scan continuously even though they are configured to do so. Besides, we have also found and demonstrated that some manufacturers seem not to apply any backoff mechanism although it is mandatory. These two unexpected behaviors have a significant impact on the performance of massive wireless sensor networks based on BLE. So, it becomes necessary to characterize these and other impairments. The proposed tests are based on device current consumption measurements and their association with the information obtained from upper layers. We describe a new low-cost generic measurement setup and provide all the necessary data (configuration parameters, scripts, etc.) for applying the proposed methodology. As an example, we use it to profile the behavior of Bluetooth Low Energy devices. Furthermore, the proposed setup can also inspire researchers to characterize other wireless technology devices, like Wi-Fi, Zigbee, LoRa, etc

Survey on wireless technology trade-offs for the industrial internet of things

Aside from vast deployment cost reduction, Industrial Wireless Sensor and Actuator Networks (IWSAN) introduce a new level of industrial connectivity. Wireless connection of sensors and actuators in industrial environments not only enables wireless monitoring and actuation, it also enables coordination of production stages, connecting mobile robots and autonomous transport vehicles, as well as localization and tracking of assets. All these opportunities already inspired the development of many wireless technologies in an effort to fully enable Industry 4.0. However, different technologies significantly differ in performance and capabilities, none being capable of supporting all industrial use cases. When designing a network solution, one must be aware of the capabilities and the trade-offs that prospective technologies have. This paper evaluates the technologies potentially suitable for IWSAN solutions covering an entire industrial site with limited infrastructure cost and discusses their trade-offs in an effort to provide information for choosing the most suitable technology for the use case of interest. The comparative discussion presented in this paper aims to enable engineers to choose the most suitable wireless technology for their specific IWSAN deployment

InternalBlue - Bluetooth Binary Patching and Experimentation Framework

Bluetooth is one of the most established technologies for short range digital wireless data transmission. With the advent of wearables and the Internet of Things (IoT), Bluetooth has again gained importance, which makes security research and protocol optimizations imperative. Surprisingly, there is a lack of openly available tools and experimental platforms to scrutinize Bluetooth. In particular, system aspects and close to hardware protocol layers are mostly uncovered. We reverse engineer multiple Broadcom Bluetooth chipsets that are widespread in off-the-shelf devices. Thus, we offer deep insights into the internal architecture of a popular commercial family of Bluetooth controllers used in smartphones, wearables, and IoT platforms. Reverse engineered functions can then be altered with our InternalBlue Python framework---outperforming evaluation kits, which are limited to documented and vendor-defined functions. The modified Bluetooth stack remains fully functional and high-performance. Hence, it provides a portable low-cost research platform. InternalBlue is a versatile framework and we demonstrate its abilities by implementing tests and demos for known Bluetooth vulnerabilities. Moreover, we discover a novel critical security issue affecting a large selection of Broadcom chipsets that allows executing code within the attacked Bluetooth firmware. We further show how to use our framework to fix bugs in chipsets out of vendor support and how to add new security features to Bluetooth firmware

Low-Power Wireless for the Internet of Things: Standards and Applications: Internet of Things, IEEE 802.15.4, Bluetooth, Physical layer, Medium Access Control,coexistence, mesh networking, cyber-physical systems, WSN, M2M

International audienceThe proliferation of embedded systems, wireless technologies, and Internet protocols have enabled the Internet of Things (IoT) to bridge the gap between the virtual and physical world through enabling the monitoring and actuation of the physical world controlled by data processing systems. Wireless technologies, despite their offered convenience, flexibility, low cost, and mobility pose unique challenges such as fading, interference, energy, and security, which must be carefully addressed when using resource-constrained IoT devices. To this end, the efforts of the research community have led to the standardization of several wireless technologies for various types of application domains depending on factors such as reliability, latency, scalability, and energy efficiency. In this paper, we first overview these standard wireless technologies, and we specifically study the MAC and physical layer technologies proposed to address the requirements and challenges of wireless communications. Furthermore, we explain the use of these standards in various application domains, such as smart homes, smart healthcare, industrial automation, and smart cities, and discuss their suitability in satisfying the requirements of these applications. In addition to proposing guidelines to weigh the pros and cons of each standard for an application at hand, we also examine what new strategies can be exploited to overcome existing challenges and support emerging IoT applications

Analytical and experimental performance evaluation of BLE neighbor discovery process including non-idealities of real chipsets

The purpose of this paper is to evaluate from a real perspective the performance of Bluetooth Low Energy (BLE) as a technology that enables fast and reliable discovery of a large number of users/devices in a short period of time. The BLE standard specifies a wide range of configurable parameter values that determine the discovery process and need to be set according to the particular application requirements. Many previous works have been addressed to investigate the discovery process through analytical and simulation models, according to the ideal specification of the standard. However, measurements show that additional scanning gaps appear in the scanning process, which reduce the discovery capabilities. These gaps have been identified in all of the analyzed devices and respond to both regular patterns and variable events associated with the decoding process. We have demonstrated that these non-idealities, which are not taken into account in other studies, have a severe impact on the discovery process performance. Extensive performance evaluation for a varying number of devices and feasible parameter combinations has been done by comparing simulations and experimental measurements. This work also includes a simple mathematical model that closely matches both the standard implementation and the different chipset peculiarities for any possible parameter value specified in the standard and for any number of simultaneous advertising devices under scanner coverage