Bluetooth 5 Advertising Extensions
By Torbjørn Øvrebekk December 13, 2017
Bluetooth 5's benefits are about much more than increased speed and extended range. Low energy advertising extensions are also a major enhancement.
Advertisements are used by devices to broadcast data and information that can be discovered and processed by observer devices. This means information can be broadcast to multiple devices at the same time, as opposed to connected Bluetooth devices, which only allow peer-to-peer communication.
Improvements in Bluetooth 5
The release of the Bluetooth 5 specification promised new functionality for connectionless services such as location-relevant information and navigation. By adding significantly more capacity to advertising packets, Bluetooth 5 aims to quicken the deployment of beacons and location-based services to users around the world.
Read more: Bluetooth 5: What to expect
Advertising extensions in Bluetooth 5 provide the capability to offload advertising data from the three traditional advertising channels to the full set of data channels for more frequency diversity. A more efficient use of the 2.4 GHz band should enable developers to increase the rate of advertised packets, as well as utilize the new PHY modes, paving the way for better streaming and beacon solutions.
> Read more: 70% of retailers to invest in beacons
All these LE PHY's supported by Bluetooth 5 can be used for advertisements with the introduction of advertising extensions:
LE 1M PHY: 1 Mb/s bit rate, 1 Msym/s symbol rate. Each bit maps to a single radio symbol. The same PHY as used in Bluetooth 4.0.
Coded PHY: 1 Mb/s bit rate, 500 or 125 ksym/s symbol rate. Each bit is coded into 2 or 8 bits using a forward error correction algorithm to provide higher tolerance for bit errors, resulting in improved range.
LE 2M PHY: 2 Mb/s bit rate, 2 Msym/s symbol rate. Doubles the symbol rate to increase the speed, at a small cost to range.
Extended Advertisements
In Bluetooth 4.0, all advertising was done on just three channels. Bluetooth 5 improves this mechanism by allowing a small header packet sent on the three primary advertising channels to point to a larger payload sent at a later time on one of the 37 data channels.
This removes the need to duplicate the data payload on all three advertising channels, while allowing considerably more advertising data in the area before running into coexistence issues.
> Read more: Bluetooth low energy Advertising, a beginner's tutorial
The specification for extended advertisements in Bluetooth 5 is almost as large as the entire original Bluetooth 4.0 specification. There are some key differences to understand before delving into development, including:
A single advertising packet can hold up to 255 bytes of data, up from 37 in Bluetooth 4.0
Advertising packets can now be chained together, allowing for even larger beacon payloads than with a single packet (a chain can hold a maximum of 1650 bytes)
Advertising packets can be sent periodically, allowing observers to lock on to a stream of advertised packets
Periodic advertisements can be combined with chained packets, allowing an even higher overall data throughput
Because older devices that don't support Bluetooth 5 will not be able to discover extended advertisements, an advertising set with legacy advertising PDUs for older scanning devices should also be used, at least until Bluetooth 5 supported hardware is commonplace in the market.
Bluetooth Advertising and beacons
Beacons can now broadcast more data and allow for a better user experience. Connectable devices can also utilize this to send more data and allow connections on the secondary advertising channels (which can help avoid interference and noise from other devices broadcasting on the primary channels).
Although beacon applications stand to benefit most from these extended advertisements, there will be a wait involved until relevant devices such as smartphones and tablets fully support Bluetooth 5 advertising extensions. It's a wait that will be worthwhile, as there is big potential for new applications and for the use of Bluetooth in more markets.
> Read more: Transforming retail with Bluetooth beacons
Topics: bluetooth
By: Torbjørn Øvrebekk
Torbjørn Øvrebekk is a senior application engineer in Nordic Semiconductor, and has worked for the company since he graduated with a Masters degree in Electronics at NTNU in 2008. Torbjørn has worked mainly with customer support, assisting customers with issues related to embedded software development and RF protocols. He has also worked closely with the Nordic sales group, providing technical assistance in the field, attending trade shows and doing technical presentations at conferences and events.