Understanding BLE

One of the most important communication protocols for IoT is Bluetooth. In fact, there are two different Bluetooth technologies. The classic Bluetooth and the newer, BLE, sometimes called smart Bluetooth; Bluetooth LE, or just BLE for short. The classic Bluetooth is useful for data streaming and provides data transfer rates up to 2 Mbps. It is commonly used in cars, especially in hands-free headsets. It has much higher data transfer rates as compared to BLE, but also much higher energy consumption.

BLE protocol has been designed with very low power consumption in mind, and uses a different set of radio techniques than classic Bluetooth. Data transfer rates in Bluetooth LE are relatively low, less than 100 Kbps. A big advantage ...

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