BLEnd: Practical Continuous Neighbor Discovery for Bluetooth Low Energy

Abstract

Identifying "who is around" is key in a plethora of smart scenarios. While many solutions exist, they often take a theoretical approach, reasoning about protocol behavior with an abstract model that makes simplifying assumptions about the environment. This approach creates a gap between protocol implementations and the models used during design and analysis. In this paper, we take a system approach to continuous neighbor discovery: starting with the concrete technology of Bluetooth Low Energy (BLE) we build a protocol, called BLEnd, tailored to its constraints. Moreover, we also consider the very real effects of packet collisions, to our knowledge a first in this domain. Our ultimate goal is to directly empower developers with the ability to determine the optimal protocol configuration for their applications; in this respect, the slotless operation of BLEnd offers richer alternatives than state-of-the-art protocols. Developers specify the minimum discovery probability, the target discovery latency, and the maximum expected node density; these are used by an optimizer tool to parameterize the BLEnd implementation towards maximum lifetime. This paper shows that BLEnd not only achieves the user-specified goals, but does so more efficiently than analogous configurations of competing protocols.