Ricerc@Sapienza

Bluetooth Low Energy (BLE) is rapidly becoming the de-facto standard for short-range wireless communications among resource-constrained wireless devices.
Initially conceived for cable replacement, Bluetooth has mostly been used for point-to-point wireless communication in the 2.4 GHz ISM band, sharing the spectrum with other technologies for local area networks including WiFi but thanks to IoT, it has found its place in low energy communications.
Nowadays, BLE is present in every mobile phone on the market and is used in almost every major field of IoT that requires efficient communication at a low energy cost, including localization, health care, audio, proximity sensing, and Covid contact tracing.
Moreover, in 2019, the Bluetooth Special Interest Group, the maintainer of the standard, formally decided to standardize the support of mesh networking, which enables many-to-many communication and is optimized for creating large-scale device networks that are suited for building automation, sensor networks, asset tracking, and any solution that requires hundreds of devices to reliably and securely communicate with one another.
Despite these promising capabilities, there is no way to date for researchers, industry, or companies to be able to study the behavior of BLE networks in the long term without actually implementing such a network with real devices.
In this project, we propose the creation of a module for the end-to-end simulation of the BLE stack to be connected with ns-3, a famous network simulator with industrial-grade specifications. This module will be based on the specifications defined by the standard and will be supported by experiments on real devices to define channel models unique to BLE and to statistically study the impact of its operations on their batteries.
Finally, this module will be made open source and will be proposed for inclusion in the ns-3 standard library to allow anyone to create their own experiments and simulations.