BLESS: Bluetooth Low Energy Service Switching using SDN

Bluetooth Low Energy (BLE) is a low-energy personal area wireless network technology that is of increasing importance for large-scale Internet of Things (IoT) deployment. By de- sign, BLE is localized to small regions and to simple network topologies. Moreover, it is not designed for dynamic enforce- ment of policy and access controls. These limitations are im- pediments to BLE based IoT service deployment, where IoT devices for a service may need to be grouped into a network slice spanning a sizable geographic region and with strong per-slice policy enforcement. This paper presents an archi- tecture for creating wide-area IoT service slices which utilize BLE devices at the edge. For this, we introduce an SDN- controlledswitch node", called BLE service switch (BLESS) that is transparently inserted between two communicating BLE devices. It can be programmed at the service layer by a central controller and enables exible, policy-based switch- ing between the devices. We describe the design of BLESS, and illustrate its utility through a few practical use cases.