Ainhoa Clemares Núñez, senior student of the UPM Radio-Communications Group, has successfully defended her final Bachelor thesis titled “Design and Development of an Android Application to Scan Bluetooth Low Energy Devices“. This work consists on an innovative application called “BlueSentinel” which is currently under registration in the Spanish Patent and Trademark Office.
BlueSentinel provides a user-friendly environment to recover all the information about the Bluetooth capabilities of the smartphone where the app is installed, as well as to detect all advertising Bluetooth Low Energy (BLE) devices around in a perimeter of up to 50 meters.
BlueSentinel is able to extract the AdData payload of the BLE packet, and parse its content to provide a complete profile of the detected device. For example: the advertiser’s device name, the power transmitted, the power received, the external appearance, the advertiser’s MAC address, the company ID, the manufacturer specific data, and many others.
BlueSentinel provides a time-limit or time-unlimited scanning and is able to detect both legacy and extended BLE packets. It can upload the latest yaml file version with all companies’ IDs in the world, and is also able to save every scanned data to open source data files like json, yaml, and csv. That is particularly interesting to monitor the RSSI of a particular device in a time interval.
This Bachelor thesis was supervised by Prof. Antonio Pérez Yuste from UPM, who is an active member of the GRC-UPM research group.