On performance evaluation of BLE 5 in indoor environment: An experimental study

Internet of Things (IoT) has revolutionized the concept of connectivity from only humans to almost everything capable of being connected. Wireless communication technologies are considered as the vital building blocks of IoT. Bluetooth Low Energy (BLE) with the highest penetration rate in consumer products has an important role in enabling IoT applications. BLE version 5 has recently been developed to meet the versatile requirements of IoT use cases. In this paper, we investigate the practical performance of BLE 5 in indoor office environment, and study the performance of its novel features. Our evaluation metrics in this study are throughput and Received Signal Strength Indicator (RSSI). In this study, BLE 5 measurements are conducted by using nRF52840 chip from Nordic Semiconductor. The acquired measurement results indicate that new Physical Layers (PHYs) of BLE 5 provide extended coverage and improves the throughput in indoor scenarios. The 2 Mbps uncoded PHY significantly improves the throughput in good RSSI zones. However, the throughput drastically drops in case of zones with moderate to weak RSSI. In particular, the feature of the coded physical layer helps extending the Bluetooth coverage, especially in Non-Line of Sight (NLOS) scenarios.