IPv6 over Bluetooth Advertisements: An alternative approach to IP over BLE

TL;DR

This paper proposes a connection-less IPv6 transmission method over Bluetooth Low Energy advertisements, offering lower latency at the expense of reliability, suitable for low-power IoT devices.

Contribution

It introduces a standard-compliant, connection-less IPv6 over BLE advertisements approach, addressing the limitations of traditional connection-oriented IP over BLE.

Findings

Lower latency compared to connection-based IP over BLE

Reduced overhead and simpler management of BLE communications

Trade-off between reliability and latency demonstrated in testbed results

Abstract

The IPv6 over Bluetooth Low Energy (BLE) standard defines the transfer of IP data via BLE connections. This connection-oriented approach provides high reliability but increases packet delays and requires substantial overhead to manage BLE connections. To overcome these drawbacks we present the design and implementation of IPv6 over BLE advertisements, a standard-compliant connection-less approach. We deploy our proposal on low-power IoT hardware and comparatively measure key network performance metrics in a public testbed. Our results show that IP over BLE advertisements offers network performance characteristics complementary to IP over connection-based BLE, trading lower reliability for shorter~latency.