Review on Bluetooth 5 Technology

Bluetooth 5 came to market just over a year ago. It was announced by the executive director of Bluetooth SIG that the new device would revolutionized the iot. The latest version of the Bluetooth 5 has much advantages compared to the Bluetooth 4.3 technology such as longer range, higher speed and extended support for connectionless services. According to market surveys, the Bluetooth will be used in more than one-third of all installed IOT devices by 2020. Typical IoT architecture has mainly physical, communication, software and application layers. Bluetooth is acting as a communication protocol, which enables devices communicate each other wirelessly.

The Bluetooth 4.x generation only supported 1Mbps PHY rate, but Bluetooth 5 generation devices have the caliber to support both 1 Mbps and 2 Mbps PHY rates. The also leads to double the data transfer between two devices and the studies shows that the current consumption is also very low compared to older versions of Bluetooth devices. This improvement effect on the time spent in low-power sleep modes in IoT devices. The fabulous thing is that Bluetooth 5 devices has the backward compatibility which provide support to the Bluetooth 4 devices to perform well in IOT.

Bluetooth 5 has the coverage area by four time than the Bluetooth 4 devices. This means it can cover a whole house or a building or it can be use in outdoor or commercial applications and IoT becoming a reality for those areas with the new inventions of Bluetooth 5. In addition to the 2M PHY, Bluetooth 5 contains two additional optional PHYs called LE Coded PHYs. This code uses slightly different packet format and it increases the Rx sensitivity which leads to improve the coverage range. LE Coded PHYs has a forward error correction(FEC) and Pattern Mapper. It applies the FEC methodology to correct bit errors upon reception of the packet and after a pattern mapper is applied to the packet to improve the efficiency of the communications. The Bluetooth 5 is defined to be +20dBm, while in the Bluetooth 4 is to be +10dBm. This increases the Tx power by 10x and it should impact on the coverage range.

One improvement regarding advertisement(beaconing) is the advertising data sets feature, which allows a single Bluetooth 5 device to send out multiple individual advertisements data sets with unique intervals and advertisement data. The new Bluetooth can also determine a scan request made by a remote device and report to the application level. The next improvement is that the three advertisements channels which were using in Bluetooth 4 is there in the Bluetooth 5 for backward compatibility, but the Bluetooth 5 devices can use remaining data channels as secondary advertisement channels to broadcast more data which improves the capacity of the channel. Another improvement is that Bluetooth 5 introduce a periodic advertising. It allows the transmitter to send out changing beaconing data periodically and with a fixed interval may receivers can listen to it

By simple Bluetooth 5 contains many robust features and improve the wireless standard feature. The Bluetooth 5 enabled phones are expected to arrive on the market during 2017 and it need some time to mature on IoT. More companies are already build chips which support Bluetooth 5 and it will be a biggest thing waiting to happen in the feature