Blender: Toward Practical Simulation Framework for BLE Neighbor Discovery

Abstract

For the widely used Bluetooth Low-Energy (BLE) neighbor discovery, the parameter configuration of neighbor discovery directly decides the results of the trade-off between discovery latency and power consumption. Therefore, it requires evaluating whether any given parameter configuration meets the demands. The existing solutions, however, are far from satisfactory due to unsolved issues. In this paper, we propose Blender, a simulation framework that produces a determined and full probabilistic distribution of discovery latency for a given parameter configuration. To capture the key features in practice, Blender provides adaption to the stochastic factors such as the channel collision and the random behavior of the advertiser. Evaluation results show that, compared with the state-of-art simulators, Blender converges closer to the traces from the Android-based realistic estimations. Blender can be used to guide parameter configuration for BLE neighbor discovery systems where the trade-off between discovery latency and power consumption is of critical importance.