Opportunistic Connectionless Undirected Information Dissemination Based on Bluetooth Low Energy Advertising Technology on Smartphones

Abstract

Recently, many new applications were developed on smartphones to facilitate our daily life. One of the potential approaches for information gathering and dissemination on smartphones is through cooperatively relaying among user devices based on short range wireless communications. To facilitate information dissemination and to improve user experiences, data transfer that neither requires connection setup nor interferes users’ current operations is highly desirable. In this work, we study the feasibility of automatic information dissemination based on Bluetooth Low Energy (BLE) legacy advertising. To improve applicability, we additionally propose an automatic connectionless undirected information dissemination (ACLUID) scheme to effectively exchange information among users without knowing the BLE device addresses in advance. We analyze the performance of the proposed ACLUID scheme to investigate the effectiveness of message exchange. By applying the ACLUID scheme, users can opportunistically exchange some messages of interest when they are occasionally located within the effective communication range of BLE with BLE activities running in the background. In addition, we implement our scheme in Android-based smartphones and perform some experiments to examine the feasibility of ACLUID under various scenarios. According to the experimental results, a large message can be completely transferred from an advertiser to a scanner within a short period of time with a high probability.

Keywords

• Advertising/scanning
• bluetooth low energy (BLE)
• information dissemination
• opportunistic communications
• smartphone