JultikaUniversity of Oulu repository

Abstract

The energy-efficient wireless connectivity is among the crucial enabler technologies for the Internet of Things (IoT) employed throughout a great number of different verticals. The Bluetooth Low Energy (BLE) radio access technology is today among the most widely spread short-range wireless communication technologies for the energy-limited IoT devices available on the market. The thesis focuses on understanding and experimentally assessing the performance of the BLE technology with respect to the maximum communication link throughput and discovering the ways how BLE can be integrated with the 5th Generation Mobile Network (5G). To reach this goal, the study investigates the BLE technology focusing specifically on the parameters affecting the communication throughput, implements and carries the empirical throughput performance measurements for various architectures involving communication between embedded devices and the communication between an embedded device and a mobile terminal, and explore the means of boosting the communication performance range of BLE-enabled devices by integrating BLE with 5G and enabling streaming of the BLE data over 5G. Based on the study, it has been shown that the Nordic UART service achieves a BLE communication throughput of 92 kbps for most of the parameter configurations of connection interval, physical layer configuration, and data lengths. Based on the observed Phone-to-Server mean throughput of 23.11 Mbps, it can be stated that the overall throughput of the end-to-end system, which includes a Board-to-Phone BLE connection and a Phone-to-Server TCP/IP connection, is entirely reliant on the throughput of the BLE connection.