Bluetooth low energy

Bluetooth low energy (Bluetooth LE, BLE, marketed as Bluetooth Smart) is a wireless personal area network technology designed and marketed by the Bluetooth Special Interest Group aimed at novel applications in the healthcare, fitness, beacons, security, and home entertainment industries. Compared to Classic Bluetooth, Bluetooth Smart is intended to provide considerably reduced power consumption and cost while maintaining a similar communication range.

Bluetooth Smart was originally introduced under the name Wibree by Nokia in 2006. It was merged into the main Bluetooth standard in 2010 with the adoption of the Bluetooth Core Specification Version 4.0.

Mobile operating systems including iOS, Android, Windows Phone and BlackBerry, as well as macOS, Linux, Windows 8 and Windows 10, natively support Bluetooth Smart. The Bluetooth SIG predicts that by 2018 more than 90 percent of Bluetooth-enabled smartphones will support Bluetooth Smart.

The Bluetooth SIG officially unveiled Bluetooth 5 on June 16, 2016 during a media event in London. One change on the marketing side is that they dropped the point number, so it now just called Bluetooth 5 (and not Bluetooth 5.0 or 5.0 LE like for Bluetooth 4.0). This decision was made allegedly to “simplifying marketing, and communicating user benefits more effectively”. On the technical side, Bluetooth 5 will quadruple the range, double the speed, and provide an eight-fold increase in data broadcasting capacity of low energy Bluetooth transmissions compared to Bluetooth 4.x, which could be important for IoT applications where nodes are connected throughout a whole house.

Bluetooth Smart is not backward-compatible with the previous (often called "Classic") Bluetooth protocol. The Bluetooth 4.0 specification permits devices to implement either or both of the LE and Classic systems.

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Wikipedia