On the Effect of BLE Beacons on Fast Bluetooth Connection Establishment Scheme

Mobile ad hoc networks (MANETs) consist of mobile terminals, such as smartphones or tablets. In Bluetooth MANETs, mobile terminals communicate with each other using Bluetooth without communication infrastructures such as base stations. Therefore, Bluetooth MANETs are deemed to be one of the communication schemes to disseminate data when base stations cannot be used in case of disaster. Since data dissemination capability or network scale that can be built deeply depends on connection establishment performance in Bluetooth MANETs, a fast Bluetooth connection establishment scheme has been proposed to establish Bluetooth connections rapidly. The fast Bluetooth connection establishment scheme combines Classic Bluetooth and Bluetooth Low Energy (BLE), and it has advantages of two different Bluetooth standards. BLE beacons utilize advertising packets of BLE to broadcast data to adjacent terminals. Since the fast Bluetooth connection establishment scheme also utilizes BLE to detect adjacent terminals, it is thought that the radio interference cause delay in detecting adjacent terminals when there are many BLE beacons within wireless range. In this paper, we conducted the simulation experiments in the Bluetooth MANETs environment to evaluate the effects of BLE beacons on the connection establishment by the fast Bluetooth connection establishment scheme.