PER Measurement of BLE in RF Interference and Harsh Electromagnetic Environment

TL;DR

This paper evaluates BLE packet error rates in harsh electromagnetic environments and under RF interference, demonstrating the robustness of coded PHY modes compared to uncoded ones in challenging conditions.

Contribution

It provides empirical PER measurements of BLE in NLOS and LOS scenarios within a reverberation chamber under interference, highlighting the resilience of coded PHY modes.

Findings

Coded BLE PHY modes show lower PER under interference.

PER increases in NLOS and interference conditions for uncoded modes.

Reverberation chamber testing simulates real-world electromagnetic environments.

Abstract

Bluetooth Low Energy (BLE) is a short-range data transmission technology that is used for multimedia file sharing, home automation, and internet-of-things application. In this work, we perform packet error rate (PER) measurement and RF testing of BLE receiver in the harsh electromagnetic environment and in presence of RF interference. We check the PER performance in the line-of-sight (LOS) and non-line-of-sight (NLOS) scenario in absence of any interfering signal and in presence of wideband WLAN interference. The BLE PER measurements are conducted in a large reverberation chamber which is a rich scattering environment. Software-defined-radio has been used to create BLE communication link for PER measurement in LOS and NLOS configuration. The BLE PER is measured both in the presence and in absence of WLAN interference. Our measurement results show a higher PER for uncoded BLE PHY modes in NLOS channel condition and in presence of wideband interference. Whereas coded BLE PHY modes i.e. LE500K and LE125K are robust to interference with lower PER measurements.