JultikaUniversity of Oulu repository

Abstract

This thesis focuses on experimental performance of the Bluetooth 5 technology and compares results with the previous version. Bluetooth technology, institute of electrical and electronics engineers (IEEE) Std. 802.15.4, and other techniques share the same unlicensed 2.4 GHz industrial, scientific, and medical (ISM) spectrum. Various technologies are operating in the same frequency band, and if the channel utilized by these technologies overlap, end in cross-technology interference (CTI).

Measurements have been performed in indoor scenario and ZigBee nodes were used as an interference. Performance output of the Bluetooth 5 is compared to a previous release Bluetooth low energy (BLE) 4 which is currently one of the popular technologies in commercial wireless devices and expected to be even more widespread in the future. This new Bluetooth technology has featured increased data rate, low power consumption, longer range, higher broadcasting capacity, and improved coexistence with other wireless technologies operating in the same frequency band. The main goal of this work was to evaluate the experimental communication range and throughput of the BLE 5 coded version under interference. Nordic Semiconductor nRF52840 chipset has been used for measurements and result shows the practical communication range and throughput of BLE 5 coded version under interference. In this work, with error correction coding, one-third BLE link gain was achieved when considering packet error rate (PER) less than 10%. In addition, ZigBee interference was found to be very harmful for the Bluetooth communication when operating in the same frequency band.