Assessing the Feasibility of Combined BLE and Wi-Fi Communication for High Data Sensing Applications
- Advanced sensors generate more data than can be transmitted using classic battery-powered wireless sensor networks. While using Wi-Fi would provide plenty of throughput, the receivers are energy hungry and, thus, the radio time needs to be reduced. Previous research suggests to combine Wi-Fi with low-power technologies such as BLE for an energy efficient coordination of the Wi-Fi radios. Existing approaches focus on individual point-to-point routes whereas certain applications require concurrent transmissions. We evaluated the combination of BLE and Wi-Fi on the ESP32-S3 multi-radio microcontroller through detailed energy and throughput measurements. The results show that established BLE connections allow to activateWi-Fi quickly on-demand; the energy efficiency of the data transmission is significantly improved over previous works but the BLE connection setup is prohibitively slow. While the combination of BLE and Wi-Fi provides high throughput with good energy efficiency, careful design of the BLE-based signalling protocol isAdvanced sensors generate more data than can be transmitted using classic battery-powered wireless sensor networks. While using Wi-Fi would provide plenty of throughput, the receivers are energy hungry and, thus, the radio time needs to be reduced. Previous research suggests to combine Wi-Fi with low-power technologies such as BLE for an energy efficient coordination of the Wi-Fi radios. Existing approaches focus on individual point-to-point routes whereas certain applications require concurrent transmissions. We evaluated the combination of BLE and Wi-Fi on the ESP32-S3 multi-radio microcontroller through detailed energy and throughput measurements. The results show that established BLE connections allow to activateWi-Fi quickly on-demand; the energy efficiency of the data transmission is significantly improved over previous works but the BLE connection setup is prohibitively slow. While the combination of BLE and Wi-Fi provides high throughput with good energy efficiency, careful design of the BLE-based signalling protocol is necessary to also achieve low latency.…
Author: | Navya Sneha Chatharajupalli, Randolf RottaORCiD, Reinhardt KarnapkeORCiD, Jörg Nolte |
---|---|
DOI: | https://doi.org/10.5555/3639940.3639948 |
Title of the source (English): | EWSN '23: Proceedings of the 2023 International Conference on Embedded Wireless Systems and Networks |
Publisher: | Association for Computing Machinery |
Place of publication: | New York |
Document Type: | Conference publication peer-reviewed |
Language: | English |
Year of publication: | 2023 |
Contributing Corporation: | ACM |
First Page: | 56 |
Last Page: | 59 |
Fundername (not EU): | Bundesministerium für Digitales und Verkehr, Deutsches Bundesministerium für Bildung und Forschung |
Project number (not EU): | 19FS2024D, 16ES1128K |
Way of publication: | Open Access |
Faculty/Chair: | Fakultät 1 MINT - Mathematik, Informatik, Physik, Elektro- und Informationstechnik / FG Verteilte Systeme und Betriebssysteme |