Status: attic
Simulating Bluetooth Smart (BLE) Ranging for Road Safety Applications
MA: Master's Thesis (or Diploma Thesis / Diplomarbeit)
A key enabler of future Intelligent Transportation Systems (ITS) is the ability to use wireless communication technologies to detect the presence of other road traffic participants. This is particularly true for pedestrians and cyclists, who are often not detected by current systems. However, it is precisely these road traffic participants who cannot easily be equipped with dedicated hardware running a custom Cellular Vehicle-to-Everything (C-V2X) or Wireless LAN (WLAN) stack. Bluetooth Smart (BLE), on the other hand, is a low power, low cost, low bandwidth wireless technology that is being used in a variety of applications and is available in many embedded systems and mobile devices. Its is designed to enable the periodic transmission of beacons to detect the presence of other devices in the vicinity and many applications such as COVID contact tracing or asset tracking use this feature. BLE is therefore a promising candidate for detecting the presence of pedestrians and cyclists in ITS applications.
Goals of the thesis
This thesis will create an application (for Linux or, optionally, a mobile platform) that can:
- periodically send BLE custom frames,
- receive such BLE frames,
- determine their received signal strength (RSS),
- upload timestamped RSS information, augmented with GPS information if available, to a central server, and
- download such information for display to the user.
Data will then be collected from real-world measurements to check to what degree it is possible to predict RSS based on the geometry of one or multiple senders/receivers with respect to each other and to their environment (most notably: distance and presence of obstacles). Secondary results will reveal the reactivity and robustness of such a system. Based on the results an abstract simulation model (taking the geometry as input and calculating RSS, reactivity, and robustness as output) of such a system is then derived. For this, embedded Computers(s) with a Bluetooth 4.1+ receiver (such as a Raspberry Pi) will be provided. The student is expected to write custom software, e.g., on top of the Linux BlueZ or Android stack. A detailed written discussion of fundamentals, related work, system design, and obtained results concludes the thesis.
Collaboration
This thesis kicks off a larger collaboration with teams at TU Braunschweig and TU Ilmenau.
Keywords
Linux, Hardware, Practical
Literature
[1] Guillaume Celosia, Mathieu Cunche. Fingerprinting Bluetooth-Low-Energy Devices Based on the Generic Attribute Profile. IoT S&P 2019 - 2nd International ACM Workshop on Security and Privacy for the Internet-of-Things, Nov 2019, London, United Kingdom. pp.24-31, DOI 10.1145/3338507.3358617ff.
[2] https://github.com/IanHarvey/bluepy
[3] https://github.com/mh-/exposure-notification-ble-python/blob/master/README.md
[4] https://learn.adafruit.com/pibeacon-ibeacon-with-a-raspberry-pi
[5] https://learn.adafruit.com/introduction-to-bluetooth-low-energy/gatt
[6] https://developer.android.com/guide/topics/connectivity/bluetooth/connect-gatt-server
[7] https://github.com/mengguang/pi-ble-uart-server
[8] https://github.com/labapart/gattlib