Beacon trains: blazing a trail through dense BLE environments

Bluetooth Low Energy (BLE) was designed as a low power alternative to classic Bluetooth. However, the use of BLE in dense, Internet of Things (IoT) deployments results in high collision rates and wasted energy. In response, we present an in-depth evaluation of the effects of having a high density of both transmitting tags and scanning devices in IoT environments. Based on our evaluation, we introduce Beacon Train Mode, an additional mode targeting dense IoT deployments with large numbers of both tags and scanning devices. Our results show that although active scanning breaks down when there are 5 or more scanning devices, beacon trains scale to any number of scanning devices.