Computers and Electrical Engineering xxx (2015) xxxxxx

Contents lists available at ScienceDirect

Computers and Electrical Engineering

journal homepage: www.elsevier.com/locate/compeleceng

Bluetooth for Internet of Things: A fuzzy approach to improve

power management in smart homes q
M. Collotta , G. Pau
Kore University of Enna, Faculty of Engineering and Architecture, Cittadella Universitaria, 94100 Enna, Italy

a r t i c l e

i n f o

Article history:
Received 14 June 2014
Received in revised form 7 January 2015
Accepted 9 January 2015
Available online xxxx
Keywords:
Power consumption
Fuzzy logic controller
Bluetooth Low Energy
Internet of Things

a b s t r a c t
Thanks to the introduction of the Internet of Things (IoT), the research and the implementation of home automation are getting more popular because the IoT holds promise for
making homes smarter through wireless technologies. There is a main requirement that
make a wireless protocol ideal for use in the IoT, that is the energy efciency. Bluetooth
Low Energy (BLE) has a high potential in becoming an important technology for the IoT
in low power, low cost, small devices. However, specic techniques can be used in such
a way as to further reduce the energy consumption of BLE. To this end, this paper proposes
a fuzzy logic based mechanism that determine the sleeping time of eld devices in a home
automation environment based on BLE. The proposed FLC determines the sleeping time of
eld devices according to the battery level and to the ratio of Throughput to Workload
(Th/Wl). Simulation results reveal that using the proposed approach the device lifetime
is increased by 30% with respect to the use of xed sleeping time.
2015 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.

1. Introduction
With the increasingly rapid development of various communication technologies, more and more devices are able to
access the internet and to interact with it. When considering a global network of smart objects of all kinds, such as computers, appliances, clothes, sensors, interacting with each other through Internet protocols, the reference scenario is called Internet of Things (IoT). The devices that are part of the network of objects are called smart objects or smart things, that
unlike normal devices are able to interact within the communication system in which they are inserted since they have
an active role. The devices can be identied by the following characteristics:
 They are the real objects characterized by cost, shape, weight, etc.
 They have limited resources in terms of processing capacity, memory, energy supply and routing [1].
 They may be inuenced and inuence the surrounding environment by acting as actuators [2].
Thanks to the developments of wireless technologies and to studies about IoT, the anywhere, any-time by anything
communication is no longer considered a true utopia. In fact, more and more devices, at any-time, even without receiving
a physical input, can access the network and interact with the other connected devices [3]. The practical signicance of

Reviews processed and recommended for publication to the Editor-in-Chief by Associate Editor Dr. Maurizio Palesi.

Corresponding author.

E-mail addresses: mario.collotta@unikore.it (M. Collotta), giovanni.pau@unikore.it (G. Pau).

http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.compeleceng.2015.01.005
0045-7906/ 2015 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.

Please cite this article in press as: Collotta M, Pau G. Bluetooth for Internet of Things: A fuzzy approach to improve power management in
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the IoT is made possible through enabling technologies such as Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs), mainly used for sensing
operations. The nodes of a WSN are sensors arranged within an environment, with the aim to detect certain data that are
send to one central node in order to process them.
With the introduction of the IoT, the research and the implementation of home automation are getting more popular [4].
In fact, built on connections between digital devices and nearly anything that can be monitored or controlled electronically,
the IoT holds promise for making homes smarter. Home Automation (HA) refers to the mechanization and automatic control
of various residential activities. Typically, HA provides a centralized control of electrical appliances, such as air conditioners,
lighting and security systems and even the home theater. Adding intelligence to home environment it would be possible to
obtain excellent levels of comfort, and another feature taken into account is the energy savings. Moreover, the integration of
several electrical devices in the household is an open challenge because of the absence of a cheap and standardized communication protocol between them [5]. Anyhow, at present, a wireless network exists in almost all homes. Smart-phones and
tablets are natural devices to enable the control of electrical ones. In such a situation, the wireless protocols become an easy
avenue for self-installation of HA systems. Moreover, a smart home has to meet several requirements such as:
 Safety, i.e. the protection from possible malfunctions.
 Security, i.e. authentication, authorization and data protection.
 Energy saving, i.e. a smart mechanism to reduce power consumption.
Several wireless technologies, such as Bluetooth Low Energy (BLE) [6], IEEE 802.15.4/ZigBee [7] and IEEE 802.11/Wi-Fi [8],
that can support the remote data transfer, the sensing and the control, have been proposed in order to embed various levels
of intelligence for smart home. BLE is being adopted by the health care industry for portable medical and lifestyle devices. On
the other hand, the battle between ZigBee and low-power Wi-Fi technologies for home control and automation has just
begun. The manufacturers of wireless devices are urgently looking for new revenue streams, and machine-to-machine communication and location-based services seem to be good places to make a bet. Both can use existing infrastructure and are
very much a part of the emerging IoT market.
Anyhow, there is a main requirement that make a wireless protocol ideal for use in the IoT, that is the energy efciency. In
many cases, the sensing nodes are battery-powered, so a low-power feature is a basic requirement. In the design of devices
that implement a wireless protocol several mechanism can be adopted in order to reduce the power consumption, including
low-leakage process technologies, best-in-class low-power non-volatile memory/ash memory technologies, architectural
innovations and various clocking schemes. For battery-powered nodes, all of those techniques are needed in order to achieve
the lowest possible power consumption.
To cope with this problem, this paper proposes a fuzzy logic based mechanism in a home automation environment. The
core of the proposed architecture is represented by a wireless network, organized in Wireless Automation Cells (WACs),
based on Bluetooth Low Energy Protocol and managed by a Master node. The Bluetooth Low Energy protocol has been chosen
from the results of an analysis carried out in the Section 2.2 of this paper. In each WAC there is a fuzzy module that aims at
the energy saving of the network. In fact, the goal is to improve the low energy consumption of BLE through a fuzzy logic
controller.
The paper is organized as follows. Section 2 deals with the BLE support for IoT in home automation environments, while
Section 3 shows main related works in order to deduce the innovations introduced with this work. Section 4 describes the
system architecture and the proposed approach, showing the fuzzy logic controller module. Section 5 shows the performance obtained by the proposed approach and nally Section 6 concludes the paper and outlines some hints for future work.

2. Bluetooth Low Energy support for IoT in home automation

In this section an analysis of wireless communication suitable for energy management in home automation applications
is presented. In recent years, wireless communication technology has seen sudden growth and several approaches are also
capable to support the energy management through widespread environmental sensing. This has been possible through the
advancements of low-power and low-cost radio frequency wireless communication technologies, with smaller form factor,
greater sensing density and longer functionalities lifetime.
In the IEEE 802.11/Wi-Fi family, the nodes compete for the medium access according to the Carrier Sense Multiple Access
with Collision Avoidance (CSMA/CA) protocol. However, contention-based approaches are not able to guarantee an upper
bound on the medium access delay, so they are not adequate for time-constrained trafc and for applications that require
low power consumption. In fact, Wi-Fi does not possess intrinsically ubiquitous characteristics, but the explosion of laptops
and mobile devices has driven widespread adoption. However, in the eld of energy management this adoption seems unlikely. In fact, the native design of Wi-Fi does not have the energy management in mind and for many applications, particularly environmental sensing, the IEEE 802.11 is considered too power hungry and in some cases the components are still too
large. For this reason, other approaches have been developed.
ZigBee, a pure wireless technology, is based upon the IEEE 802.15.4 standard for WPANs (Wireless Personal Area Networks). It is intended to be a low-cost, low-power wireless mesh network standard allowing for secure communication with
a data rate of up to 250 kbps. ZigBee was originally conceived as an alternative to Wi-Fi/Bluetooth Classic around 1998 as a
Please cite this article in press as: Collotta M, Pau G. Bluetooth for Internet of Things: A fuzzy approach to improve power management in
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M. Collotta, G. Pau / Computers and Electrical Engineering xxx (2015) xxxxxx

solution for self-organizing ad hoc digital networks. ZigBee-based HA solutions operate in the 2.4 GHz range and have a
range of 70 m indoors and up to 400 m outdoors. The networks are self organizing, and any member can be the controlling
node. There are plenty of ZigBee home automation solutions already available in the market and also in the literature applications in industrial contexts have been proposed [9].
Technologies such as Bluetooth Low Energy (BLE) came up in part due to the unsuitability of Wi-Fi, ZigBee and other such
technologies in order to provide networking with low power consumption, low cost, simplicity [10] and the ability to remain
in a suspended state for extended periods of time [11]. Most of the HA technologies have been developed when Bluetooth
Classic was unable to satisfy all of these criteria. However, over the last few years, thanks to the new specications of Bluetooth 4.0, the BLE has slowly, but surely, gained a signicant foothold in the home automation industry. The rise of BLEs role
in home automation has primarily come about due to two factors.
 Networked nature of todays electronics: commonly used electronic devices such as televisions and AV receivers have
started becoming part of the home IP network. Even though the networking aspects were added to bring in support
for on-line streaming services or network playback, it became an easy value-add for the manufacturers to expose control
of the device functionality over the network.
 Rise of mobile computing devices: the increasing rate of adoption of smart-phones and tablets was an added boon. These
devices ensure that consumers have access to a portable controller for the electronics connected to the network.
2.1. Bluetooth Low Energy protocol
Classic Bluetooth is used for short range wireless communication among devices in networks where nodes can easily
come and go. It uses 79 channels with a bandwidth of 1 MHz on the 2.4 GHz ISM band with a pseudo-random frequency
hopping sequence [12]. In a Piconet each Master device establishes the frequency hopping sequence and can have up to 7
Slave connections. A device can be in more than a single Piconet and overlapping Piconets are Scatternets. However, in
the literature, several optimization approaches have been proposed in order to improve Classic Bluetooth, especially to make
it usable even in industrial contexts [13,14].
Bluetooth 4.0, or BLE, implements an entirely new protocol stack along with new proles and applications. Its core objective is to run for a very long time on a coin-cell battery. It also enables devices to connect to the internet, where traditionally
they have not been able to, in an efcient way through its client/server architecture. BLE is designed to be easy to develop for
at a cheap price.
Bluetooth Low Energy operates in the 2.4 GHz ISM band with only 40 channels spaced 2 MHz apart (Fig. 1). It is capable of
transmitting at a rate of 1Mbit/s using GFSK modulation. Like Bluetooth Classic, it uses frequency hopping, but it uses adaptive frequency hopping and at a slower rate. BLE uses 3 of the 40 channels to advertise which allow for device discovery.
After a device is discovered and connected the remaining 37 channels are used to transmit data.
There are 4 basic modes through which a BLE device can operate, that are master device mode, slave device mode, advertising mode, and scanning mode. The advertising mode is used by the device to periodically advertise information that can be
used to establish a link. It can also use this mode in order to respond to additional queries that another device might make.
The scanning mode is used to capture advertise packets. Slave and Master Modes are used once a link has been established
between 2 devices, and their primary functions are to allow the devices to read, to write and to query each other. The device
that starts out in advertise mode will assume the slave device mode and conversely the device that is initially scanning mode
will assume the master device mode.
Regarding to the packet format, there are 2 types of packets, Data and Advertise, each with variable lengths (Fig. 2). BLE
Data packets consist of an 8 bit preamble, 32 bit access codes that are dened by the radio frequency channel used, a variable
protocol data unit (PDU) ranging from 2 to 39 bytes and a 24 bit CRC. This means that the shortest packet can be as small as
80 bits or as long as 376 bits. It also means that a transmission time can range from 80 ls to 0.3 ms. Advertise packets on the
other hand, have protocol data unit containing a 16 bit header and up to 31 bytes of data.
There are three ways through which two devices can associate, Just Works, Out of Band, and Passkey Entry. An advertising
device transmits packets on the advertise channels with a PDU containing the device address and up to 31 bytes of additional
information. A scanning device is able to see the address and depending on the advertiser, additional information may be

Fig. 1. Bluetooth Low Energy radio links: channels in green are used for advertising. (For interpretation of the references to colour in this gure legend, the
reader is referred to the web version of this article.)

Please cite this article in press as: Collotta M, Pau G. Bluetooth for Internet of Things: A fuzzy approach to improve power management in
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Fig. 2. Bluetooth Low Energy data packet format.

sent upon request. This means that a good amount of information can be obtained about the device without even establishing a connection. Advertising is done sequentially on all available channels at a rate from 20 ms to every 10 s depending on
conguration. On the other hand a scanner device is congured with a scan window and a scan interval. Once a connection is
made, the scanner will supply the advertiser with 2 critical pieces of information, that are the connection interval and the
slave latency. The connection interval is used to determine the start time of connection events. A connection event is the
exchange sequence of data packets. The other parameter, the slave latency, is the amount of connection intervals that a slave
can ignore without losing the connection. This is done in order to optimize the power consumption. After a link is established
the communication is carried out over the 37 channels. The PDUs have up to 37 bytes of payload, along with a packet header,
and a Message Integrity Check of 4 bytes. A communication event is initiated by a Master device, alternating between master/slave until one of them stops the transmission.
The BLE protocol stack (Fig. 3) is partitioned into a Controller and a Host. The Controller handles the lower layers of the
stack responsible for capturing physical packets and the radio frequency used by the radio. The Host handles the upper layers
of the stack that include the application, the attribute protocol, and the L2CAP. The Host and Controller can be either collocated or the Host can run in the application processor with the application. In the second option, a host Controller Interface
(HCI) is used by the Controller and the Host to communicate. The BLE protocol stack consists of:
 Controller: the link layer controller captures the physical packets in the air band; it also manages the timing and the
queue of incoming and outgoing packets. In short, it is responsible for the physical level data ow. This component
can also be used as a rewall to the device by ltering packets from specic devices.

Fig. 3. Bluetooth Low Energy protocol stack.

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 L2CAP: the controller communicates with the Logical Link Control and Adaptation Layer (L2CAP) protocol via the HCI or
directly if collocated. The main function of this component is to provide data services to the upper level layers and for
multiplexing and segmenting packets into fragments for the controller. Conversely, it reassembles packets from the controller before they are routed to the upper level layers.
 GAP: the Generic Access Prole (GAP) is responsible for dening generic procedures that are used in the pairing and linking of the device. It is the interface for the application layer that implement different Bluetooth modes (Advertising, Scanning, etc.).
 SM: the Security Manager (SM) is used for the authentication and the encryption. It uses AES-128 bit encryption engine to
do so and is also responsible for pairing and key distribution. This component is used by the Master device to ease the
computing demands of security on the Slave device.
 ATT: the Attribute protocol is a communication method designed in order to optimize the transmission of small packets.
ATT are pairs of attributes and values that can be used to read, to write, or to discover other devices.
 GATT: the Generic Attribute Prole (GATT) is responsible for describing the different service frameworks and is an extension to ATT that is specic to Bluetooth LE 4.0. It interfaces with the application layer through the application proles.
Each application prole denes data formatting and how it should be interpreted by the application. The proles improve
on power efciency by reducing the amount of data being exchanged. They are designed for specic functionality, for
example there is a Heart Rate prole, a Glucose prole, and an Alert Notication prole among dozens and dozens of others. This makes it easy for developers to create applications aimed at specic functionality using the predened attributes/value pairs found in each prole.
Regarding to the power consumption, it is necessary to note that Bluetooth 4.0 achieves an increased power efciency.
First, it uses a lower duty cycle, this means it goes to sleep for longer periods of time and wakes up less frequently to send
or receive packets. Second, using the GATT proles BLE is able to send smaller data packets in short bursts in order to save
power. The data transmission can be triggered by a local event and is available for a client to access at any time. Lastly, BLE
does not maintain links with devices whenever are not communicating. Whereby, the device goes to sleep and ends the link
once the exchange is complete. A link is re-established rapidly upon the next communication exchange. The transmit time of
Bluetooth Classic is 100 ms whereas that of BLE is 3 ms. Moreover, the current consumption peak of BLE is 10 mA less than
Bluetooth Classic and in best case scenarios has a power consumption that is 1/100th than that of Bluetooth Classic.
BLE 4.0 is not designed to stream large amounts of data; it is designed to periodically send short bursts of data. There are 2
types of BLE 4.0 devices, dual mode which is backwards compatible with previous BT versions, and single mode which only
supports BLE 4.0. Dual mode devices that perform high data rate streaming do not benet from the low power consumption
of BLE 4.0, which is only accomplished when BLE low data rate mode is used.

2.2. Wireless protocols comparison

For IoT, a required feature of the chosen short-range technology is support for mobile use cases where a smart-phone or
other mobile device can be used as a temporary gateway. Some of the important features when selecting the appropriate
short-range wireless technology for IoT use cases are the following:
 Cost of the radio technology: as many of the devices (sensors) are small low-cost devices, the radio must not add too
much additional cost to the bill-of-material. This also implies that the radio and device application in many cases need
to share the same computing engine (micro-controller).
 Power consumption: many use cases require battery or some kind of energy harvesting technology as a power source.
 Ease-of-use: it must be easy to associate a device to the network and to the Internet services.
 Security: the authentication and the encryption must be adequately supported by the wireless technology and sometimes
end-to-security (all the way from sensors to the Web services) is required.
 Available ecosystem: possibility to connect to smart-phones, tablets, PCs, home gateways, etc. is important. This requirement also drives volumes and has an important impact on the cost (a good example is Bluetooth Classic where the large
volumes of phones and phone accessories have lowered the costs).
 Range: it is necessary the capability to cover an enough range or have some capabilities to extend the coverage (repeaters,
routers, etc.) without having too big impacts on the system cost.
Table 1 shows how different wireless technologies t specic verticals. It is necessary to note that the green check-mark
indicates that the protocol behaves well in the reference application, unlike the orange color that indicates a just satisfactory
behavior. On the contrary, the red cross indicates that the protocol is not suitable for that application. NFC can be ruled out
except for very specic use cases/verticals. IEEE 802.15.4 based technologies will become a niche technology especially in
those areas in which it is already used such as home and building automation and smart energy.
According to Table 2 (currently most commonly wireless solutions used in home automation contexts) the following
conclusions can be deduced:

Please cite this article in press as: Collotta M, Pau G. Bluetooth for Internet of Things: A fuzzy approach to improve power management in
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Table 1
Technologies and verticals.
BLE

IEEE 802.15.4

IEEE 802.11

NFC

Remote control
Security
Health and tness
Home and building
Industrial
Positioning
Payment
Automotive

Table 2
Comparison of wireless technologies and their usefulness in IoT.
BLE

IEEE 802.15.4

IEEE 802.11

Cost
Security
Power consumption
Ecosystem
Reliability
Ease of use
Range

 All three technologies have built-in link layer authentication and encryption which sometimes needs to be completed
with end-to-end security from the sensor to the Web application. Some IoT use cases may be fully behind an enterprise
rewall (e.g. a use case inside a factory where the IoT Internet Service runs on a local server). There are also IoT systems
operating on a wide-area network but acting as local networks by the use VPN tunnels or similar security mechanisms.
 Correctly used, Bluetooth Low Energy has the potential for less power consumption than IEEE 802.15.4 (less overhead).
 The lack of native support for IEEE 802.15.4 in mobile devices (smart-phones, tablets, laptops, etc.) is a problem especially
for mobile or temporarily mobile use cases.
 The ecosystem with phones, tablets, laptops and phone accessories will drive down the cost for BLE.
 IEEE 802.15.4 has a main advantage in its range since many IEEE 802.15.4 based technologies (e.g. ZigBee) support mesh
whereby coverage can be extended by using routers.
 Bluetooth Low Energy is very reliable with its support for Adaptive Frequency Hopping (AFH) and other features inherited
from Bluetooth Classic.
 IEEE 802.11/Wi-Fi can be used in devices with less demands on low power consumption and as a wireless backbone in
combination with other technologies.
Bluetooth Low Energy has a high potential in becoming an important technology for the Internet of Things in low power,
low cost, small devices. However, there are still use cases where IEEE 802.15.4 based technologies are used especially in
areas where it is already established. In spite of its installed base in smart energy, home and building automation applications, IEEE 802.15.4 faces competition in BLE in these applications as well. Anyhow, Bluetooth Low Energy has a lower energy
consumption than IEEE 802.15.4 and for this reason may be the best choice in applications of home automation. IEEE 802.11
is used in devices where cost, low power is less important and as a wireless backbone combined with the other wireless
technologies.
The analysis carried out in this Section clearly explains why in this work BLE has been chosen for a home automation
application. As mentioned above, one of the biggest advantages of BLE is precisely its low power consumption. In any case,
specic techniques can be used in such a way as to further reduce the energy consumption of BLE.
3. Energy saving approaches
The energy saving is one of the main reasons for the emergence of smart home automation concept. Most wireless autonomous devices are usually battery-powered. Therefore it is essential to manage the smart devices to best utilize the scarce
power resources over long time. In the literature adequate research works that describes the application of a fuzzy logic controller in order to reduce the power consumption over Bluetooth Low Energy wireless networks in the new smart homes
introduced by the Internet of Things are missing. For this reason, in the following subsections the research works that analyse the energy savings in BLE applications and fuzzy approaches in order to reduce the power consumption will be analyzed
separately.
Please cite this article in press as: Collotta M, Pau G. Bluetooth for Internet of Things: A fuzzy approach to improve power management in
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3.1. Power consumption in Bluetooth Low Energy

The authors of [15] measure and model the energy consumption through, real device, of Bluetooth Low Energy protocol
and compare it to the one of IEEE 802.15.4/ZigBee protocol. The results show that when compared to ZigBee the BLE is very
energy efcient in terms of number of bytes transferred per Joule spent. Moreover, the authors analyse the energy overhead
of IPv6-based communication over BLE, which is relevant for IoT scenarios, and the results show that it remains reasonable.
All these results show that the energy efciency of BLE could be further improved by allowing more packets to be sent within
a connection event and by implementing a frequency hopping in order to prevent interference.
In [16] the power consumption of ANT, ZigBee, and Bluetooth Low Energy protocols is analyzed. It is highlighted that it is
not straightforward to predict the exact power consumption in a cyclic sleep scenario from the data sheet alone. For this
reason the actual power consumption is determined by combination of interacting factors, not just the average receive,
transmit, and sleep currents and data rate typically given in the data sheet. In fact, the parameters that affect the power consumption are not the active or sleep currents but rather the time required to reconnect after a sleep cycle. The results of the
analysis show that Bluetooth Low Energy achieve the lowest power consumption, followed by ZigBee and ANT. Anyhow, the
power consumption of tested protocols might change depending on other factors such as packet size variations, transmitter
and receiver distance, and hub parameters.
A quantitative analysis for assessing the energy performance of BLE advertiser device is presented in [17]. In fact,
although there are some prior arts focusing on BLE energy performance, it still lacks a thorough study on the important
aspect of device discovery. Such energy cost, introduced by intermittent scanning or connection set-up, could seriously affect
the battery endurance ability of the devices. The authors propose an accurate mathematical model for the device discovery
dynamics, and derive the performance for the advertiser under the condition of various parameter settings. This mathematical model allows to study in details the system behavior in different parameters and to investigate the potential performance trade-off between achievable energy and accessing latency.
In [18] a design of an ultra-low power and highly-integrated portable health monitoring system, based on Bluetooth Low
Energy, capable of measuring a subjects ECG, respiration, and body temperature is presented. Compared to a former design
using MSP430 MCU and Bluetooth 2.1 proposed by the same authors, the novel design can save as much as 75% power consumption. For this reason, the paper analyses the power consumption in detail and tests the performance of the proposed
approach in a real device. The results show that the proposed design implemented in a device based on BLE make it suitable
to monitor the ECG, the respiration and the body temperature.
The authors of [19] provide a performance evaluation BLE technology and explore its potential applications. The analysis
notes that In BLE there is a trade-off between energy consumption, latency, piconet size, and throughput that mainly
depends on the connInterval and connSlaveLatency parameters. Evaluation results show how these parameters can be tuned
wisely in order to meet the application requirements, such as power consumption.
In conclusion, it is clear that Bluetooth Low Energy emerges as a strong low-power wireless technology for single-hop
communication use cases. In fact, BLE allows the connection of a large amount of new devices to the applications of Internet
of Things, such as smart homes.

3.2. Fuzzy approaches for energy saving

The concept of smart home energy management involves the integration of various appliances with a smart control unit
capable of bidirectional wire-line or wireless communication between the controller and the utility. One problem that arises
with these features is various compatibility issues between the different appliances, various smart controllers, and communication protocols.
Fuzzy logic controllers are becoming increasingly popular in everyday life. Home automation, health, industry and Intelligent Transportation System are some examples of application elds. Many studies, conducted in different scenarios in
which fuzzy logic controllers are applied, focused on power consumption.
An automated energy management system is presented in [20]. The proposed system is composed of a fuzzy controller
and by an intelligent lookup table. Through its membership functions, the fuzzy controller evaluates the appropriate outputs
for the intelligent lookup table (a neural network) that maps inputs to desired outputs. Simulation results show that the proposed automated energy management system is able to nd the best energy efciency scenario in different situations.
The author of [21] propose a smart energy control for house energy consumption with maximizing the use of solar energy
and reducing the impact on the power grid while satisfying the energy demand of house appliances. A fuzzy-based energy
management control is proposed in order to reduce the consumed energy of the building while respecting a xed comfort.
The results demonstrate that the proposed energy management system controller provides a better strategy compared to the
conventional method for cost saving (almost 20%).
A fuzzy logic system is presented in [22] in order to save battery life of wireless sensor network nodes and to have an
efcient, robust and cost effective sensing network that can monitor events of interest, for example those of a home automation environment. The proposed fuzzy logic system helps efciently to decide the situation of ON/OFF state for active/
sleep mode of the processing and communication parts of the sensor node. Simulation results show that the proposed system is energy efcient and have property of liveness, soundness, without any deadlock state during execution.
Please cite this article in press as: Collotta M, Pau G. Bluetooth for Internet of Things: A fuzzy approach to improve power management in
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In [23] fuzzy logic is used to reduce the energy consumption of Wireless Sensor Network (WSN) nodes. The lifetime of the
wireless sensor networks has always been a crucial challenge. Most of the energy is consumed in data transmission to the
sink. Authors propose an approach in which the movement in a circular path of sink node is governed by fuzzy logic based
mechanism. Simulation results show that wireless sensor network having base station moving on circular path gives more
lifetime than that of stationary base station case.
A fuzzy logic controller which adapts the MAC protocol parameters by employing local node inputs such as battery power
and average packet trafc is presented in [24]. MAC parameters are selected individually by each node according to local
information and based on two fuzzy descriptors: energy and trafc. In order to evaluate the proposed approach the authors
perform analytical computation of power consumption and compared it with a constant sleeping period approach, showing
that the fuzzy selector improves the life of the network by reducing the power consumption of nodes that are close to the
base station and nodes that have low battery charge.
The analysis of this research works shows that fuzzy logic can be applied in order to reduce the power consumption in
several contexts. Therefore, although BLE has a low power consumption, it is clear that a fuzzy mechanism could be introduced in order to further improve the power consumption in home automation environments.

4. System architecture and requirements

Home automation environments are characterized by applications in which small embedded devices, like sensors and
actuators, spend most of their time in a sleep state and wake up with a given periodicity or when a critical event occurs.
Several methodologies and techniques, such as networking intelligent computational devices, data/resources/services management modules, and so on, have to be merged together in order to design such environments.

4.1. System requirements

Several requirements must be met in order to use wireless networks in home automation environments. System requirements that drive the design of the proposed architecture can be summarized as follow:
 The system must be capable to use wireless protocols in home automation environments that are increasingly characterized by noise and multiple propagation behavior.
 Reduce non-determinism in wireless communication: the system should reduce the sources of non-determinism as much
as possible on the wireless channel and on the wired medium.
 The system must support multiple wireless cells. In fact, when it is necessary to cover a large area, multiple wireless connection points are required in order to provide coverage.
 Interoperability and interchangeability: the devices developed by different manufacturers shall interoperate with each
other within the architecture. Moreover, It must be possible to replace a component from one manufacturer by an equivalent one from other manufacturers.
 Fault tolerance: the architecture must prevent performance degradation in case of fault to any part of the system. It is
necessary to conduct a fault analysis of the system performance in order to provide fault tolerance mechanisms. Moreover, the system must be self-healing, thus it must be able to detects communication errors and x them by its own
means.
 Communication reliability: the system must provide reliability in terms of communication services. Whereby, the message error rate must be kept acceptable for the automation application.
 Resources allocation: this mechanism should be provided for communications between coordinators and end nodes in
order to grant several system resources like bandwidth, reaction time etc.
 Quality of Service (QoS) provisioning: the system must implement advanced QoS mechanisms and a clear policy to ensure
guaranteed performance for predened processes. The system must provide high QoS degree for all kind of operations
involved in the system.
 Differentiated QoS classes: as end-users require multiple types of trafc with different constraints within the same network, the system should support different QoS class for the different classes.

4.2. The proposed architecture

In order to satisfy the above mentioned requirements and to realize the functionalities here described, the proposed
architecture is composed by several independent Wireless Automation Cells (WACs) (Fig. 4), managed by a BLE
Master device. The wireless network for home automation, based on BLE, is composed by all the WACs within which there
are the Field Devices (FDs), that are Bluetooth Low Energy devices dealing with a specic task. In fact, the proposed
wireless home automation network enables a variety of use cases, for this reason a non-exhaustive list of examples is
provided below:
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M. Collotta, G. Pau / Computers and Electrical Engineering xxx (2015) xxxxxx

Fig. 4. Home automation BLE architecture.

 Light control: lights can be controlled from any switch in order to reduce the need of new wired connections. Lights can
also be activated in response to a command from a remote control. Moreover, they can be turned on automatically when
presence and luminance sensors detect that people are in a poorly illuminated room.
 Smart energy: window shades, HVAC, central heating, and so on may be controlled depending on the information collected by several types of sensors that monitor parameters such as temperature, humidity, light, and presence. Whereby,
unnecessary waste of energy can thus be avoided. Furthermore, smart utility meters can be used to detect usage peaks
and alert the household devices that may be causing them.
 Security and safety: advanced security systems can be based on several sensors (e.g., smoke detectors, glass-break sensors, and motion sensors) in order to detect possible risk situations that trigger appropriate actions in response. For example, smoke detectors may activate re alarms.
 Remote control: over the years, infrared technology has been used for wireless communication between a remote control
and devices such as TVs, Hi-Fi equipment, and heating, ventilating, and air conditioning systems. However, infrared
requires line-of-sight and short-distance communication. Radio frequency technology overcomes these limitations.
Some of the WACs of the proposed architecture behave as WSNs and then they can continuously monitor environments
with less human effort and are low cost and low power. Through wireless communication, the Master node receives and processes data detected by FDs placed inside the WAC. It also allows sending user commands or system commands to FD nodes.
Moreover, wireless links allow the communication among mobile devices (such as smart-phones or tablets) and the WACs.
Whereby, people can authenticate themselves inside the home automation system and subsequently monitor data detected
by sensor nodes and, in case of need, send commands.
The range of BLE radio may be optimized according to application. The majority of Bluetooth devices on the market today
include the basic 30 foot, or 10 m, range of the Bluetooth Classic radio, but there is no limit imposed by the specication.
With BLE, manufacturers may choose to optimize range to 200 feet (about 67 m) and beyond, particularly in home sensor
applications where longer range is a necessity. Anyhow, it is necessary to take into account the energy consumption of
the devices. For this reason, the Energy Saving Fuzzy Controller is necessary in order to ensure the power consumption management. This module dynamically manages sampling times in order to prolong sleeping periods of Field Devices. In this
way, it is possible to improve energy savings and, at the same time, prolong batteries and the network life-cycle.

4.3. Energy Saving Fuzzy Controller

In home automation applications the end nodes continuously work inside the monitored environment. For this reason it
is necessary to develop an energy management paradigm to ensure network exibility, adaptability and scalability. Moreover, this mechanism must be able to optimize power resources and, at the same time, increase the life-cycle of devices.
The behavior of the proposed wireless network is similar to a WSN scenario, where it is not possible to determine a priori
nodes behavior since they are often used to monitor sporadic events. However, trafc ows generated by WSNs can be considered as periodic [25].
A centralized mechanism is proposed in order to regulate the sleeping time of the eld devices in a Bluetooth Low Energy
network, with the aim of reducing their power consumption. Each device sends information about its operating conditions to
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Fig. 5. Architecture of the proposed FLC.

Fig. 6. Periodic packets count.

the Master node when its sleeping time is expired. The Master node is a special device properly equipped for executing computational tasks. In the proposed approach the Master node uses a fuzzy logic controller (FLC) in order to calculate the new
values of the sleeping time of each FD, as shown in Fig. 5.
The FLC determines the sleeping time of the FD according to the battery level and to the ratio of Throughput to Workload
(Th/Wl). The throughput is the sum of both periodic and aperiodic packets sent by the device. The workload is the total number of packets that the device has to send. Since the number of aperiodic packets can not be known a priori and, as a consequence, can be considered as a random variable, the calculation of the number of periodic packets (P periodic ) can be done by
increasing a counter when the following equation is satised:

Pperiodic

%
T end
1 X

i
Tsi iT

start

where T start and T end represent the initial and nal instants of the sleep phase, respectively. Tsi is the sampling time of the i-th
node that coincides with the packet emission time.
Lets consider an example, reported in Fig. 6, in which T start 5; T end 8 and Tsi 2. Eq. (1) is satised two times, i.e. for
T 6 and T 8. According to this example, the Th/Wl parameter is calculated as:

Th=Wl

1k
2k

where k is a random value that refers to the number of aperiodic packets to send, 1 refers to the last periodic packet that the
node has to transmit while 2 are the number of periodic packets that fall within the sleep time window.
The proposed FLC considers three triangular membership functions (Low, Medium, High) for each input variable. These
functions fuzzify the crisp inputs, while the ranges of which are:
 Th/Wl: [0, 100];
 battery_level: [0, 1024], where 0 represents the lowest level of battery while 1024 represents the highest level of battery
and it is the maximum value at the output of a 10-bit AD converter (with an appropriate electronic signal conditioning
circuit).
In the same way, three triangular membership functions (Low, Medium, High) are dened for the sleeping time. In this
case, the range of the crisp values of this output variable is:
 sleeping time : 0; 10  sampling time (sec).
where the sampling_time value is a constant value dened at design time for each eld device. Fuzzy membership functions
of the Th/Wl, the battery_level and the sleeping_time are depicted in Fig. 7, where the degree of membership is represented by
normalized values [01].
As shown in Table 3, the output value is determined through 9 fuzzy rules based on the IF-THEN statement of classic programming languages. For example, considering rule 1, if Th/Wl is Low and battery level is Low, sleeping time will be Medium.
Finally, the output value is defuzzied using the centroid mechanism:
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Fig. 7. Membership functions of input and output parameters for the FLC.

Table 3
FLC inference rules - A = Antecedent, C = Consequent.

Pn
sleeping time

Rule

A (Th/Wl)

A (battery_level)

C (sleeping_time)

1
2
3
4
5
6
7
8
9

Low
Low
Low
Medium
Medium
Medium
High
High
High

Low
Medium
High
Low
High
Medium
Low
High
Medium

Medium
Low
Low
Medium
Low
Medium
High
High
High

Outi  C i
Pn
i1 C i

i1

where Out i is the output of rule base i, and C i is the center of the output membership function.
5. Performance evaluation
5.1. Simulation model description
The approach proposed in Section 4.3 can be applied regardless of the network topology. As depicted in Fig. 8, a star topology of a generic WAC has been chosen for the performance evaluation. Both the Master node and the eld devices are
equipped with a micro-controller and a wireless module BLE compliant. More in detail, the numerical values used in the simulations are extracted from the following devices:
 16 bit MCU Microchip PIC24F family (PIC24FJ256GB108) [26];
 BLE121LR Radio Frequency Transceiver Bluetooth Low Energy [27].
The simulations have been conducted with a model which has been built in Simulink/Matlab (Fig. 9). The main aim of this
model is to simulate the behavior of the Master node and of a eld device. The Field Device block manages the battery consumption of the eld device. The sleeping time and the transmission power are acquired as input parameters of this block
through a feedback loop system. This block produces two output variables that are used as input variables by the fuzzy logic
controllers: Th/Wl and the battery_level.
The activities of the micro-controller and of a connected sensor have a low impact on the battery consumption. In fact,
their energy requirement is estimated as 50 mA (MCS). This value has been measured in an electronic board characterized by
the PIC24FJ256GB108 micro-controller and a DS18B20 [28] temperature sensor. Whereby, the battery consumption mainly
depends on the working state of the device. When the device is sleeping, the battery consumption is 50 mA 0:5 lA0:5 lA
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Fig. 8. An example of WAC star topology.

Fig. 9. Model scheme.

Fig. 10. Battery consumption ow chart.

is the power consumption of the BLE module in sleeping mode [27]). On the contrary, when the device is transmitting, the
transmission power heavily affects the energy consumption. The battery consumption trend is evaluated in relation to the
sleeping time by means of the Simulink/Stateow environment. This tool uses ow charts and nite state machines in order
to represent the evolution of a system. The Chart section, created in Simulink/StateFlow, related to the behavior of the battery consumption is represented in Fig. 10.
Considering a 10:8 V lithium-ion battery, the maximum level of the battery when it is fully charged is 3100 mA, while the
corresponding digital value, acquired through a 10 bit AD Converter, is 1024 (MaxBit). It is necessary to note that when the
device is in sleeping mode, the power consumption is mainly due to the micro-controller and to the sensor, since the RF
transceiver consumption is negligible. In this case, the consumption is 0.0046 bit/s. This value is determined by the following
relation:

Consumption Sleep Mode

MCS  MaxBit
FullBattery  3600

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where 3600 is the number of seconds in an hour. By applying this formula the power consumption of each device in sleeping
mode is:

Consumption Sleep Mode

50  1024
0:0046
3100  3600

Whereby, when the device is transmitting, the battery consumption is 0.0046 bit/s, while in case of maximum transmission
power (0 dB) the RF transceiver consumption is 36 mA [27]. As depicted in Fig. 9 the TXPower value is obtained as follow:

Consumption Transmission Mode

36  1024
0:0033
3100  3600

and it is necessary to underline that this value is xed since the considered transceiver does not allow to change the transmission power [27]. The proposed FLC has the Th/Wl and the battery_level as input variables and dynamically produces the
sleeping time considered as multiple value (from 1 to 10 times) of the sampling time (1 s).
5.2. Simulations results
In order to validate the proposed approach several simulations have been carried out. The battery level during a simulation period of 48 h is depicted in Fig. 11. In particular, the proposed approach has been compared with the results obtained

Fig. 11. Battery consumption comparison.

Fig. 12. Th/Wl behavior.

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without FLC, i.e., assuming that the transmission power (0 dB) and the sleeping time (equal to 1, coinciding with the sampling time) are both xed. As it is possible to see, the power consumption reduction, obtained with the proposed approach,
prolongs the device lifetime. In fact, due to the proposed FLC the battery will be fully discharged after 170,600 s, i.e. after 47 h
and 38 min. On the contrary, in the standard case, the battery will be fully discharged much earlier, after only 120,100 s, i.e.
after about 33 h and 36 min. Using the proposed approach, an improvement of about about 30% has been obtained. This is a
good result that emphasizes the goodness of the approach proposed in this paper. It, therefore, lends itself well in IoT applications where it is necessary to have a very low energy consumption.
In Fig. 12 the Th/Wl behavior using the proposed approach is depicted. As it is possible to see, the Th/Wl uctuates
between 75% and 35% and these values are acceptable especially in those application elds with a moderate variation of data,
e.g. temperature detection, where the most important thing is to prolong, as much as possible, the battery lifetime rather
than to ensure high Th/Wl performance.
In order to further validate the proposed approach another simulation has been carried out to make it suitable also in
contexts characterized by real time constraints. For this reason, the proposed FLC has been modied so that the sleeping time
does not increase too much since the main aim is to obtain better performance in term of Th/Wl. In fact, as depicted in
Fig. 13, a greater Th/Wl has been obtained (between 65% and 85%). However, also an increased battery consumption has been
measured as a consequence. The battery consumption measured in this simulation scenario is depicted in Fig. 14. The

Fig. 13. Th/Wl behavior in time-constrained environments.

Fig. 14. Battery consumption comparison in time-constrained environments.

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15

performance of the proposed approach (about 42 h) are lower compared to the previous simulation but, even in this case, are
still better than the standard case.
Considering the results obtained from both simulations, it is clear that the use of a FLC provides considerable benets in
terms of power consumption reduction. In a non-real-time context, it is possible to set the FLC in such a way as to increase
the sleeping time of network nodes in order to maximize the the batteries lifetime, while in the presence of real-time constraints then the sleeping time should be reduced in order to obtain the best network performance in terms of Th/Wl for
example. However, it is necessary to highlight that the results obtained from the simulations are closely related to the type
of membership function used by the FLC, which are triangular in this paper. The use of different membership functions can
greatly change the results obtained with the proposed approach. For example, as shown in [29], the use of gaussian membership functions [30] can increase the accuracy greatly, without degrading the computational performance. Then the use of
these membership functions could improve even more the performance achieved by the approach proposed in this work.
6. Conclusions
In this paper a fuzzy logic based mechanism is presented in order to improve the lifetime of devices in a home automation
wireless network. A thorough analysis has been done in order to determine the wireless communication protocol and the
results showed that Bluetooth Low Energy has a high potential in becoming an important technology for the Internet of
Things because one of the its biggest advantages is precisely its low power consumption. Anyhow, specic techniques
can be used in such a way as to further reduce the energy consumption of BLE. In fact, the main aim of this work is to dynamically changes the sleeping time in order to increase the battery duration of the eld devices. Simulations results are very
promising and demonstrate that using the proposed FLC a substantial reduction of the energy consumption is obtained compared to simulations carried out with xed sleeping time. Reference values for the execution of the simulations are obtained
from the data-sheets of two off-the-shelf devices, i.e. Microchip micro-controller (16 bit MCU PIC24F family
PIC24FJ256GB108) and Bluegiga radio frequency transceiver (BLE121LR Bluetooth Low Energy). Future work will deal with
a real implementation of the proposed approach with these devices, in order to conrm the results obtained by the simulations. Moreover, the membership functions can be represented by Gaussian functional shapes in order to increase the accuracy greatly, without degrading the computational performance.
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Mario Collotta is Assistant Professor with tenure in the Faculty of Engineering and Architecture at the Kore University of Enna, Italy, and since 2011 he is
scientic responsible and director of Telematics Engineering Laboratory. His research activity is mainly focused on the study of real-time networks and
systems. He is a member of IEEE and has published 2 book chapters, and over 40 refereed international journals and conference papers.
Giovanni Pau is currently a PhD student at the Kore University of Enna, Italy. His research interest includes wireless sensor networks, soft computing
techniques and real-time systems. In each of these research elds, he has produced several publications in international conferences and journals.

Please cite this article in press as: Collotta M, Pau G. Bluetooth for Internet of Things: A fuzzy approach to improve power management in
smart homes. Comput Electr Eng (2015), http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.compeleceng.2015.01.005