Getting Started with Bluetooth Low Energy

Chapter 1. Introduction

Bluetooth Low Energy (BLE, also marketed as Bluetooth Smart) started as part of the Bluetooth 4.0 Core Specification. It’s tempting to present BLE as a smaller, highly optimized version of its bigger brother, classic Bluetooth, but in reality, BLE has an entirely different lineage and design goals.

Originally designed by Nokia as Wibree before being adopted by the Bluetooth Special Interest Group (SIG), the authors weren’t trying to propose another overly broad wireless solution that attempts to solve every possible problem. From the beginning, the focus was to design a radio standard with the lowest possible power consumption, specifically optimized for low cost, low bandwidth, low power, and low complexity.

These design goals are evident through the core specification, which attempts to make BLE a genuine low-power standard, designed to actually be implemented by silicon vendors and used in the real world on a tight energy and silicon budget. It might be the first widely adopted standard that can realistically lay claim to running for an extended period of time off a humble coin cell, though many other wireless technologies regularly make that claim in their marketing.

What Makes BLE Different

While Bluetooth Low Energy is a good technology on its own merit, what makes BLE genuinely exciting—and what has pushed its phenomenal adoption rate so far so quickly—is that it’s the right technology, with the right compromises, at the right time. For a relatively young ...