Fast Collision Simulation for Cyclic Wireless Protocols

TL;DR

This paper introduces a fast simulation method for cyclic wireless protocols like BLE, significantly reducing computation time by predicting packet collisions based on protocol cyclicity, enabling efficient analysis of dense wireless networks.

Contribution

A novel simulation technique exploiting protocol cyclicity to accelerate collision simulations by an order of magnitude, applicable to BLE and other cyclic wireless protocols.

Findings

Simulation speed increased tenfold in realistic scenarios

Accurate prediction of next colliding packets without full simulation

Applicable to BLE, ANT+, and similar cyclic protocols

Abstract

With most modern smartphones supporting wireless protocols such as Bluetooth Low Energy (BLE) or ANT+, the number of networks are growing rapidly. Therefore, collisions among multiple networks need to be considered for choosing the appropriate protocol parameters. With growing numbers of networks, simulations for estimating the collision rate become computationally very complex and lengthy. The large simulation times therefore constitute a major limitation in the analysis of complex cases. In this paper, we present a novel simulation technique which can speed up collision simulations by one order of magnitude in realistic situations. Whenever the transmission of a packet is simulated, the cyclic nature of protocols like BLE is exploited to predict the next packet that has a chance of colliding. All transmissions in between can be skipped without affecting the simulation results. Based on the transmission intervals of the networks, one can compute a certain shrinkage per cycle of the time offset between their packets. Using this shrinkage and the current offset between the starting times of any two packets, our proposed simulation model can accurately predict the next pair of packets that needs to be simulated. Whereas our proposed technique aims at the BLE protocol, the theory is generic and can be used for many other cyclic protocols such as ANT/ANT+ as well.