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SeamBlue: Seamless Bluetooth Low Energy Connection Migration for Unmodified IoT Devices

Best Paper Award NominationConference paper
Syed Rafiul Hussain, Shagufta Mehnaz, Shahriar Nirjon, Elisa Bertino
International Conference on Embedded Wireless Systems and Networks (EWSN), pages 132-143
Publication year: 2017

At present, Bluetooth Low Energy (BLE) is dominantly used in commercially available Internet of Things (IoT) devices – such as smart watches, fitness trackers, and smart appliances. Compared to classic Bluetooth, BLE has been simplified in many ways that include its connection establishment, data exchange, and encryption processes. Unfortunately, this simplification comes at a cost. For example, only a star topology is supported in BLE environments and a peripheral (an IoT device) can communicate with only one gateway (e.g. a smartphone, or a BLE hub) at a set time. When a peripheral goes out of range, it loses connectivity to a gateway, and cannot connect and seamlessly communicate with another gateway without user interventions. In other words, BLE connections are not automatically migrated or handed-off to another gateway. In this paper, we propose SeamBlue , which brings seamless connectivity to BLE-capable mobile IoT devices in an environment that consists of a network of gateways. Our framework ensures that unmodified, commercial off-the-shelf BLE devices seamlessly and securely connect to a nearby gateway without any user intervention.