Improving Discovery Process Toward User Engagement Based on Advertising Extensions in Bluetooth Low Energy Networks

The use of Bluetooth Low Energy (BLE) beacons enhanced further for connectionless services such as location-specific information and navigation. With BLE 5.0, the way beacons deliver more information can move away from the current model of app-paired-to-device to a connectionless IoT. When users pass areas with installed BLE beacons, their mobile devices can receive specials, promotional contents, and discount coupons. However, the beacons are only broadcasting. This means that beacons are not able to collect information from the users with mobile devices. In this paper, we propose responsive advertising with the wait-slot scheme (RAWS) based on advertising extensions to improve the performance of the discovery process before further communications in BLE networks. Besides, we consider the energy consumption and investigate the latency-energy tradeoff with our proposed scheme. The theoretical lower bounds for both latency and energy of the discovery process as well as their tradeoff are presented. In addition, we formulate the state transition diagram for analyzing the performance of our proposed scheme. Simulation results validated by analysis results show that RAWS indeed improves the latency and the energy consumption of the discovery process in BLE networks.