eAFH: Informed Exploration for Adaptive Frequency Hopping in Bluetooth Low Energy

Abstract

With more than 4 billion devices produced in 2020, Bluetooth and Bluetooth Low Energy (BLE) have become the dominant solutions for short-range wireless communication in IoT. BLE mitigates interference via Adaptive Frequency Hopping (AFH), spreading communication over the entire spectrum. However, the ever-growing number of BLE devices and WiFi traffic in the already crowded 2.4 GHz band lead to situations where the quality of BLE connections dynamically changes with nearby wireless traffic, location, and time of day. These dynamic environments demand new approaches for channel management in AFH, by both dynamically excluding frequencies suffering from localized interference and adaptively re-including channels, thus providing sufficient channel diversity to survive the rise of new interference.We introduce eAFH, a new channel-management approach in BLE with a strong focus on efficient channel re-inclusion. eAFH introduces informed exploration as a driver for inclusion: using only past measurements, eAFH assesses which frequencies we are most likely to benefit from re-inclusion into the hopping sequence. As a result, eAFH adapts in dynamic scenarios where interference varies over time. We show that eAFH achieves 98-99.5% link-layer reliability in the presence of dynamic WiFi interference with 1% control overhead and 40% higher channel diversity than state-of-the-art approaches.