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Direction Finding Capability in Bluetooth 5.1 Standard

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Abstract

Bluetooth technology is a standard prescribed for short-range wireless communication that uses low-power radio frequency at a low cost. It is interoperable with all devices as it consumes a very small amount of energy. The Bluetooth Core Specification provided by Bluetooth Special Interest Group (SIG) will be adding direction finding feature in the Low Energy (LE) standard. This feature will enable a tracker to find the target by estimating the relative angle between the tracker and target. It uses either Angle of Arrival (AoA) or Angle of Departure (AoD) method with multiple antennas switching for direction estimation. To support this feature, the packet structure in LE physical layer is modified. The frames of the LE uncoded packets like the Protocol Datagram Unit (PDU) Header is modified and an additional frame known as Constant Tone Extension (CTE) is added to the LE packet structure. To implement the above ideas, we need to generate a portion of the LE packets in the National Instruments (NI) Bluetooth measurement toolkit. NI Bluetooth measurement toolkit is used for testing and measurement of Bluetooth RF signals. The results show that the CTE, which is needed for direction finding capability, is successfully incorporated in the BLE.5.1 packet structure.

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Acknowledgment

This work was carried out at National Instruments R&D, Bengaluru, India, as a part of an internship course. The authors acknowledge the company for providing the resources during the course of the internship, without which the execution of the project would not have been possible. The authors would also like to thank the manager Abraham George for his constant support.

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Correspondence to Nitesh B. Suryavanshi .

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© 2019 ICST Institute for Computer Sciences, Social Informatics and Telecommunications Engineering

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Suryavanshi, N.B., Viswavardhan Reddy, K., Chandrika, V.R. (2019). Direction Finding Capability in Bluetooth 5.1 Standard. In: Kumar, N., Venkatesha Prasad, R. (eds) Ubiquitous Communications and Network Computing. UBICNET 2019. Lecture Notes of the Institute for Computer Sciences, Social Informatics and Telecommunications Engineering, vol 276. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-20615-4_4

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-20615-4_4

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  • Publisher Name: Springer, Cham

  • Print ISBN: 978-3-030-20614-7

  • Online ISBN: 978-3-030-20615-4

  • eBook Packages: Computer ScienceComputer Science (R0)

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