Introduction
Did you hear about Bluetooth low energy? Beacon ? all of these terms are for the same thing. a small device that can run on coin cell battery for months or years.
4,486,000 Sensors deployed globally by May 2017. can you digest the number? the industry is huge. and that's we need to understand how Technology is recreating the business Ecosystem
What's Bluetooth Low Energy?
Bluetooth 1.0 was introduced 1999. versions kept rolling out. But in 2011 something big happened, Which is Bluetooth 4.0 that included Bluetooth Low Energy. BLE added a new dimension for the wireless communication and opened a new era for an innovative set of applications.
Bluetooth low energy wasn’t about extending range, or enhancing data rate or even enhancing power consumption. It has created a whole new concept in wireless communication. And that’s why Bluetooth low energy isn’t just an upgrade for the previous Bluetooth version. Even as a communication architecture and software stack. Developers have to rewrite their applications to comply with Bluetooth low energy as your application isn’t upgraded to BLE when you replace your Bluetooth V3.0 device with Bluetooth V4.0. your application must operate in a different way.
Bluetooth Low Energy vs Bluetooth Classic
This is a technically deep question with lots of details but we will try to crack it in the terms that affect your technical/business decision.
Bluetooth Classic is connection oriented. This means that you can’t exchange a byte before establishing a connection. Establishing a connection Bluetooth classic has some solid steps that you have to pass through
- Discovery of nearby devices that mark themselves as visible
- Discover profiles by the target device to communicate with
- Establishment of a connection between source and target
practically speaking, this process takes from 3 up to 15 seconds according to lots of variables. Data rates can exceed 1Mbs in real actions. Thus, it’s suitable for applications that are data hungry like audio devices, printers, Internet tethering...etc.
Cons of Bluetooth classic are size, power, and price. Relatively the hardware size is larger than Bluetooth low chips as the Bluetooth classic software stack is much more complex than the BLE one. Higher complexity means more resources required to handle thus, higher cost and power consumption :)
On the other hand, Bluetooth low has two different ways of communication. Connection oriented and connectionless. In the connectionless mode, the BLE sender just broadcasts the data around and every listener can pick it without the need to initiate a connection. Thus, faster data exchange and lower power consumption.
In BLE, connections are simpler than Bluetooth classic. There are no profiles. To start a connection the source waits for a packet indicating that target is accepting the connection (Connectable advertising packet) then send a request packet to the target. The target stops advertising and establishes a private connection.
We need to add two important pieces of information here.
- For connectionless data transmission, there’s a limited size for the developers to use
- in Bluetooth V4.x it’s 33 bytes! Yes, only 33 bytes :)
- in Bluetooth V5.x it’s 256 bytes!
For , the bandwidth is limited. Barely you can reach ~125kbit/s it best circumstances. Thus, this bandwidth won’t transmit large data buckets well. don’t expect media streaming as easy as Bluetooth classic :)
So, it’s clear now that they are two completely different technologies with different pros and cons. Each of them is required in different situations. Which is also far away from the WiFi domain as lots of people thought that Bluetooth will eat up WiFi. We may talk about this in a different article.
Now, do you still think about BLE like you think before? Tell us your story with BLE and I’m ready for any Questions :)