Android application to explore and benchmark connection to multiple bluetooth low energy (BLE) sensortags

• Main Author: Lim, Min Kuan
• Other Authors: School of Computer Engineering
• Format: Final Year Project
• Language: English
• Published: 2016
• Subjects: DRNTU::Engineering::Computer science and engineering
• Online Access: http://hdl.handle.net/10356/66630
• Institution: Nanyang Technological University

Texas Instruments (TI) SimpleLink SensorTag is a low-power Bluetooth Low Energy (BLE) enabled device that contains multiple sensors which allows mobile devices to connect and get notified of sensor readings. Designing of applications or firmware for this device was made easy with a comprehensive support platform. An example application for iOS or Android is also provided for developers to explore the capabilities of the SensorTag. Source codes for this example application is also provided to help mobile application developers to get started. With the samples available, this project will explore the maximum number of SensorTags that can be connected realistically to a single host or mobile application and benchmark the data transfer rate that is derived from different use case scenarios. Since support for BLE on Android started on its version 4.3 release on 2013, improvements are still being made. It was found that the current maximum number of BLE devices that can be connected to a single Android host is 7 devices. Experiments were carried out to collect the data transfer rate that was made on a separate Android application and these results were stored on the cloud where they could be displayed on the web as graphs for analysis. Results are compared against the theoretical throughput of BLE where results are found to be much lower due to a variety of factors which affects the transfer.