Enhanced-BLE: A Hybrid BLE-ESB Framework for Dynamically Reconfigurable and Energy-Efficient 2.4 GHz IoT Communication

TL;DR

Enhanced-BLE is a hybrid framework combining BLE and ESB protocols on a Nordic platform, significantly improving energy efficiency, throughput, and latency for 2.4 GHz IoT communication.

Contribution

It introduces a novel hybrid BLE-ESB framework with adaptive scheduling, enabling high-throughput, low-latency, and reliable IoT communication on existing hardware.

Findings

ESB nearly halves packet transmission time and energy compared to BLE

Doubles forward throughput with ESB over BLE

Reduces wake-up latency and energy by nearly twentyfold during intermittent operation

Abstract

Bluetooth Low Energy (BLE) is widely used in IoT systems because of its low power consumption, interoperability, and reliable bidirectional communication. However, its connection-oriented architecture introduces trade-offs among wake-up latency, throughput, and energy efficiency, limiting its suitability for burst-mode and on-demand sensing applications. Enhanced ShockBurst (ESB), a lightweight connectionless protocol supported by the same 2.4 GHz Nordic Semiconductor hardware, enables fast wake-up and efficient data transmission, but does not provide BLE-level robustness for sustained bidirectional communication. This work systematically benchmarks BLE and ESB on a unified Nordic nRF54L15 platform and proposes Enhanced-BLE, a hybrid framework that integrates the two protocols to extend conventional BLE operation. Experimental results show that ESB nearly halves packet transmission time and energy compared with BLE, doubles the achievable forward throughput, and reduces wake-up latency and energy by nearly twentyfold during intermittent operation. However, ESB reverse transmission may suffer packet loss, whereas BLE maintains reliable bidirectional communication. Enhanced-BLE addresses this trade-off through adaptive radio scheduling and coexistence-aware connection management, combining ESB-based high-throughput forward transmission with BLE-based reliable reverse communication. The framework enables BLE-to-ESB handover within approximately 18 ms and restores BLE operation within 49 ms from standby mode. Enhanced-BLE also achieves approximately twofold higher forward throughput than BLE while reducing wake-up latency. These results demonstrate a practical and hardware-compatible strategy for low-latency, high-throughput, energy-efficient, and reliable 2.4 GHz IoT communication.