Bluetooth 5

Bluetooth 5 has just been announced. The specification will be published within a few months, so still we can only talk about it to some level of details. But what we do know officially there will be a "double speed" option which essentially means the raw data rate will double from the current 1Mbps to 2Mbps. Bluetooth has also announced quadrupling the range. Doubling the data rate and increasing the range are usually contradictory to each other. Normally you increase the range by slowing the data rate and you are able to increase the rate when your link budget can accommodate it.

So reading into the Bluetooth's announcement one feature becomes apparent: adaptive data rate. Bluetooth 5 is the first low power radio that can go faster or slower depending on the application requirements. Which is absolutely phenomenal and brings incredible flexibility to product designers and system architects.

The double data rate will play a very important role in the increasingly dense digital ceilings in commercial applications. It effectively doubles the number of sensor nodes that can be installed within a given cubature. A single message duty cycle will go down to around 200µs, meaning the system will be capable of reaching around 500 randomly transmitted messages per second per channel, while still maintaining low collision rates. The ultra-low duty cycle will also help with power consumption.  200µs at 10mA at 1.8V is 3.6µJ. Including pre and post - processing overhead with the current state of the art cores, we are looking at numbers between 5µJ and 10µJ of energy required to send a single message. Assuming a coin cell battery holds 5kJ, it is sufficient to power a sensor node for 1 Billion transmission cycles. Which is 30 years at 1 message per second. I know this may sound like science fiction, but this is now and real.

The quadruple range, on the other hand is important for outdoor applications. At Silvair we've already demonstrated 500m range achieved on Bluetooth 4 modules. In that case Bluetooth 5 means a single hop range of 2km. Street lights, smart cities, agriculture / crops monitoring:  to name just the few potential applications.

With Bluetooth 5 and Mesh around the corner, it's been an incredible leap from where we were just a couple of years ago. An incredible achievement that underlines what a highly motivated, 30-thousand member strong organization is capable of delivering. As I've been saying a number of times: we have reasons to believe Bluetooth will be the most successful IoT protocol.