Investigating the impact of physical layer transmission for Bluetooth LE Audio

Abstract: Bluetooth Low Energy (BLE) is a widely used low-energy version of Bluetooth’swireless protocol. To meet increasing requirements of modern wireless audio devices,Bluetooth LE Audio was released with its new Low Complexity CommunicationsCodec (LC3) being much more data efficient than its predecessor Low Complexity SubBand Coding. Because of its increased data efficiency, LC3 opens the door of exploring usage ofvarious physical layer configurations, especially those with lower data rates. Thedifference in performance when streaming audio with the uncoded LE 2M and 1Mconfigurations, compared to using the LE coded S=2 and S=8 configurations (whichhave a lower throughput) points to a research gap which this thesis aims to fill. To be able to gather data necessary to fill the identified gap, multiple iterations of bothsoftware and hardware artefacts were made. The produced artefacts were designed torun the same Bluetooth version (LE Audio) and switch between the physical layerconfigurations. Throughput and current consumption in varied ranges was measuredthrough usage of the artefacts. The results from the experiments show that for energy optimization, an adaptive schemewould not be beneficial over only using LE 2M. However, an adaptive scheme for thephysical layer can be used for LE Audio to improve range and stability. This doeshowever, come with the cost of increased energy consumption.