BluMoon: Bluetooth Low Energy Emulation System with Software-Implemented Controller

In the Internet of Things (IoT), Bluetooth Low Energy (BLE) plays the important role of providing a path between a terminal device and a gateway. For the development of BLE applications, testing is important; however, two major problems exist in that physical device preparation is costly and replay testing is difficult. To avoid these problems, we propose a novel approach to BLE application testing that employs emulation using the newly designed BluMoon architecture, which is a BLE emulation system with utilization software. The BluMoon emulation system design follows the communication model of actual BLE. However, BluMoon uses software-implemented pseudo controllers instead of physical controllers. Interaction with remote devices is emulated through exchange of virtual packets, where each virtual packet encapsulates an entire BLE link layer packet format in its payload. Here, we implement a pseudo controller with an advertising function, establishing a connection and exchanging data. We also evaluate the BluMoon implementation performance and measure the resource usage at BluMoon execution, the received packet loss rate, and the response time of HCI command execution. The results show that BluMoon exhibits performance satisfactory for practical application, for all measured items.