BluMoon: Bluetooth Low Energy Emulator for Software Testing

In software system testing using Bluetooth Low Energy (BLE), it is necessary to evaluate the system, including the wireless communication. However, it is difficult to build a test environment for testing with physical machines because of installation costs. This problem can be solved by emulation to reproduce BLE communication on computers; however, a BLE emulator is required. In this paper, we propose a BLE emulator called BluMoon for testing software systems using BLE. We impose the following requirements on the BLE emulator: (1) calculating the received signal strength for each frame and (2) imitating radio interference. To satisfy these requirements, we devised a software-implemented BLE controller with a host controller interface as a boundary and devised a data format called the BluMoon frame for sending and receiving data frame by frame. We designed and implemented BluMoon, and performed functional and performance evaluation as well as a comparative experiment with a physical environment. The results revealed that it is possible to implement a BLE emulator that meets the aforementioned requirements.