BLESS: Bluetooth low energy service switching using SDN

Abstract

Bluetooth Low Energy (BLE) is a low-energy personal area wireless network technology that is of increasing importance for large-scale Internet of Things (IoT) deployment. By design, BLE is localized to small regions and to simple network topologies. Moreover, it is not designed for dynamic enforcement of policy and access controls. These limitations are impediments to BLE based IoT service deployment, where IoT devices for a service may need to be grouped into a network slice spanning a sizable geographic region and with strong per-slice policy enforcement. This paper presents an architecture for creating wide-area IoT service slices which utilize BLE devices at the edge. For this, we introduce an SDN-controlled “switch node”, called BLE service switch (BLESS) that is transparently inserted between two communicating BLE devices. It can be programmed at the service layer by a central controller and enables flexible, policy-based switching between the devices. We describe the design of BLESS, and illustrate its utility through a few practical use cases.