Evaluating Bi-Directional Connectionless BLE for Bike-To-Everything Wireless Communications

Bike-to-everything (B2X) communication enhances urban safety by enabling real-time information exchange among bicycles, other road users and infrastructure. A key enabler of B2X is Bluetooth Low Energy (BLE), valued for its low power consumption and widespread adoption. While BLE has been well studied for unidirectional communication, two-way discovery, which requires devices to both advertise and scan to achieve mutual awareness in B2X scenarios, remains largely unexplored. Existing models for bi-directional communication assume ideal channel conditions and lack experimental validation, overlooking real-world factors like radio propagation effects and energy consumption. This makes it unclear whether BLE can support timely and energy-efficient message exchange in realistic environments. To address these gaps, we (i) adapt an existing analytical model to capture hardware-specific BLE behaviors and validate it through targeted real-world experiments; (ii) develop and validate a detailed energy consumption model for two-way communication based on BLE hardware measurements; and (iii) define and empirically evaluate new metrics to assess BLE's reliability and timeliness in realistic non-line-of-sight environments. Our findings offer practical guidance for optimizing BLE configurations in real-world B2X deployments.