Bluetooth Firmware Development And Automation BLE Mesh

Abstract

Bluetooth is a wireless protocol and standard for personal area networks. As the low power, wide-area network (LPWAN) market expands, there are so many more options for low power protocols for Internet of Things (IoT) applications. One of the wireless protocol is Bluetooth Low Energy. Now, Bluetooth has hardware and software stack as layered and modular archi- tecture. The hardware is configured at the boot time using software i.e. firmware. In this thesis, development of firmware for LE (Low Energy) controllers is carried out. Now the range of BLE can be futher increased through data transaction in multiple hops. This brings a BLE Mesh network into existence. The thesis work can be divided into two parts - Firmware Development and Firmware Automation. The automation is done using Perl scripts that remove the need of manually run- ning of sanity test cases using Broadcom's proprietary tool for verifying BLE Mesh firmware functionality. The other scripts are for verifying specific Mesh functional- ities. The firmware is designed for providing Host Controller Vendor Specific Commands for Auth chip access and for developing BLE Mesh network. Broadcom's Bluetooth chipsets, protocol analyser, bluetooth snifier, Host Controller Interface tools and JTAG debugger are used for this purpose.