Adaptive Physical Layer Selection for Bluetooth 5: Measurements and Simulations

The main target of this article is to propose a simple Received Signal Strength Indicator- (RSSI-) based adaptive Physical Layer (PHY) selection approach for Bluetooth Low Energy 5.0 (BLE 5) and compare the performance of adaptive PHY selection with the performance of individual PHY. This article also validates the simulation results acquired from the in-house developed Ray Tracing (RT) tool with the BLE 5 measurements conducted in a corridor of the TUAS building, Aalto University. The performance metrics considered for the analysis are RSSI, throughput, and outage ratio. The impact of different transmission power on BLE 5 is also analyzed. The obtained simulation results indicate a Root Mean Square Error (RMSE) of about 4.6 dB between the measured and the simulated RSSI at 2.4 GHz frequency. By investigating these results, an adaptive PHY selection algorithm is proposed in this article. The adaptive PHY selection approach enhances the mean throughput of the system and improves the outage ratio as well. In the light of acquired results, the adaptive PHY selection scheme shows significant performance gain and is found more beneficial in the case of an environment with mixed RSSI samples, i.e., a mix of low and high RSSI values.