What Is Bluetooth LE? - MATLAB
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    What Is Bluetooth LE?

    Bluetooth® LE is a wireless communication protocol introduced in Bluetooth 4.0. It was designed to consume significantly less power than Bluetooth Classic and supports applications such as health care, audio, industrial automation, consumer electronics, and localization.

    Understand the typical challenges associated with modeling Bluetooth LE systems, such as coexistence with WLAN and scheduling requirements. Simulate Bluetooth LE systems, and analyze and visualize network performance using MATLAB® and Bluetooth Toolbox. These performance metrics include energy consumption, latency, packet delivery ratio, and bit error rate.

    Apply Bluetooth LE system design to key applications such as localization, mesh networking, and LE Audio. Localization is a technique used to track the position of Bluetooth LE devices using one or multiple locator nodes. It is accomplished using triangulation techniques, such as angle of arrival (AoA) and angle of departure (AoD). Mesh networking utilizes managed flooding to increase the robustness of sensor networks that must operate for years without maintenance. LE Audio is an evolution to Bluetooth audio, which enables applications such as multi-stream audio, audio sharing, and support for hearing aids.

    Use MATLAB and Bluetooth Toolbox to simulate and design Bluetooth LE systems for these application areas.

    Published: 15 Mar 2022

    Bluetooth Low Energy, or Bluetooth LE, is a wireless communication protocol that was designed to consume significantly less power at the cost of somewhat lower data rates compared to Bluetooth Classic. Introduced in Bluetooth 4.0, this design choice was made to support highly mobile applications such as health care, audio, industrial automation, and localization.

    In this video, we will talk about the challenges associated with Bluetooth LE and take a deep dive into a few key applications. We will also demonstrate how to use MATLAB and MathWorks Bluetooth Toolbox to design, simulate, and test Bluetooth LE as part of your wireless system design. Although Bluetooth LE holds many advantages over Bluetooth Classic, system designers still need to address certain Bluetooth LE modeling challenges. Bluetooth LE occupies the same 2.4 gigahertz band as WLAN requiring Bluetooth engineers to ensure coexistence with WLAN networks.

    Scheduling is also a major consideration in Bluetooth systems, due to latency and other quality of service requirements. Using MATLAB and Bluetooth Toolbox, you can simulate and analyze Bluetooth LE network performance with and without WLAN interference. You can visualize Bluetooth channel sensing and adaptive frequency hopping in the presence of WLAN interference, as shown here.

    One key application of Bluetooth LE is in locating sensors or nodes in 3D environments by computing the angle of arrival and departure from locator. A single locator can identify position using a range and angle calculation, while multiple locator nodes allow for more precise positioning through triangulation. This low power position and capability can be used for applications such as equipment tracking and warehouses, indoor pedestrian navigation in an airport, or connected vehicles.

    Using MATLAB and Bluetooth Toolbox, you can design and simulate components of positioning in an environment with real world RF impairments, path loss, and noise. You can apply those simulations to calculate node positions using angle of arrival and angle of departure techniques. Bluetooth Toolbox enables data fusion with Kalman filtering to improve positioning accuracy over traditional Bluetooth.

    Mesh Networking is another application of Bluetooth LE that uses a decentralized system of Bluetooth LE devices in a network. It utilizes managed flooding to transmit messages along devices in range keeping the system robust to single or even multiple points of failure. Bluetooth Mesh offers an inexpensive, highly reliable, and scalable communication model, and is found in applications such as network lighting control, health care facilities, and smart industry.

    Using MATLAB and Bluetooth Toolbox, you can design a Bluetooth LE mesh network, configure spatially aware node positions, and visualize packet flow between nodes. You can also simulate mesh networks to determine critical nodes and to manage flooding scenario.

    LE Audio is the next generation of Bluetooth audio, which enables low power audio networks to be built and designed for residential and industrial environments as pictured in this 3D floor plan. It includes new features such as Isochronous Channels and Low Complexity Communication Codec to provide greater audio quality compared to previous Bluetooth Codec standards.

    LE Audio has enabled the creation of new Bluetooth applications such as multi-stream audio, personal and location based audio sharing, and support for hearing aids. Using MATLAB and Bluetooth Toolbox, you can simulate an audio broadcast network in a variety of environments, you can configure broadcast isochronous groups defined by the synchronized links between one central node and up to 31 peripheral nodes. Once you have specified your BIG parameters, you can add impairments and visualize the packet delivery ratio of your simulated LE system on a heatmap.

    For more information about Bluetooth LE, explore the Bluetooth Toolbox product page. To learn more about how Bluetooth LE can be applied to your wireless communications system design, explore the wireless communications solutions page.