The past couple of years have seen a heightened interest in the Internet of Things (IoT), transcending industry, academia and government. As with new ideas that hold immense potential, the optimism of IoT has also exaggerated the underlying technologies well before they can mature into a sustainable ecosystem. While 6LoWPAN has emerged as a disruptive technology that brings IP capability to networks of resource constrained devices, a suitable radio technology for this device class is still debatable. In the recent past, Bluetooth Low Energy (LE) - a subset of the Bluetooth v4.0 stack - has surfaced as an appealing alternative that provides a low-power and loosely coupled mechanism for sensor data collection with ubiquitous units (e.g., smartphones and tablets). When Bluetooth 4.0 was first released, it was not targeted for IP-connected devices but for communication between two neighboring peers. However, the latest release of Bluetooth 4.2 offers features that makes Bluetooth LE a competitive candidate among the available low-power communication technologies in the IoT space. In this paper, we discuss the novel features of Bluetooth LE and its applicability in 6LoWPAN networks. We also highlight important research questions and pointers for potential improvement for its greater impact.

As we consider a new generation of Internet of Things and Humans (IoTH) applications that place humans at the epicenter of the control system the need to gather information from the immediate vicinity, in addition to global clues, is gaining importance. The loosely coupled Bluetooth Low Energy (BLE) data collection framework enables a new way of architecting IoTH systems where resource constrained BLE advertisers broadcast events, and devices inevitably carried by humans (such as smartphones) implicitly gather such notifications. While such a mechanism significantly alleviates data scavenging, it introduces serious limitations in terms of operational security. In this work, we show the applicability of BLE broadcast advertisements for indoor location sensing (as part of an IoTH application) and demonstrate an attack on the same system. Based on this preliminary case study, we discuss other security implications on BLE broadcasting.

The global positioning system (GPS) system is a dominant wireless technology that enables reliable location sensing for a diverse range of outdoor mobile applications. Following rising demands for location sensing, low-cost GPS receivers are becoming widely available; but their energy demands are still too high to be useful for many of these applications. For energy eficient GPS sensing, the possibility of oading a few milliseconds of raw signal samples and leveraging the greater processing power of the cloud for obtaining a position fix is being actively investigated. In an attempt to reduce the energy cost of this data oading operation, we propose SparseGPS: a lightweight GPS acquisition mechanism based on sparse approximation.