Abstract
As the Internet of Things (IoT) becomes ubiquitous, one critical question is their scalability tolarge numbers in a dense area. Bluetooth Low Energy (BLE) Technology is one of the most popularwireless protocols for IoT devices, and it has increased the theoretical limit to a very large number,but in practice this limit is much lower. This thesis explores the practical limits in terms of the abilityto maintain connections and in aggregate bandwidth by considering implementation issues such as thebehavior of the underlying run-time support on the wireless nodes and the smartphone OS. Comparedwith paired communication, experiment results show that broadcast communication is more stableand achieves higher aggregate data bandwidth. The contribution is that engineers will have a muchbetter idea about not only scalability but also the reason behind the limits so that they can scale theirdesigns accordingly without much trial and error.