BLEdge: Edge-centric programming for BLE applications with multi-connection optimization

Recent years have witnessed the rapid growth of IoT (Internet of Things). Bluetooth Low Energy (BLE) is one of the most popular wireless protocols to implement IoT applications because of its energy efficiency and low-cost properties. However, the development of BLE applications is time-consuming and exhausting. Users are required to write programs for both sides of a BLE connection using complicated low-level APIs. Moreover, it needs much expertise for developers to set appropriate parameters in accordance to different application requirements, especially when there exist multiple concurrent BLE connections. To address these problems, we propose BLEdge, an edge-centric programming approach for BLE applications with multi-connection optimization. First, we propose a wireless bus abstraction for BLE programming. With this, users can write BLE applications in an edge-centric way, as if the BLE-connected peripherals are physically attached to the edge node. Second, we advocate an optimization approach for BLE connection parameters. This optimization approach considers the time slot collision problem under a multi-connection scenario. We conduct extensive experiments with the nRF52840DK platform. Experiment results show that BLEdge can reduce 62.50% to 90.55% LOC (Lines of Code) when developing BLE applications. Furthermore, our parameter optimization approach can reduce up to 42.23% energy consumption.