Bluetooth Low Energy (BLE)
The low-power branch of Bluetooth, designed for devices that exchange small packets infrequently and can run for months or years on a coin cell.
Bluetooth Low Energy is a separate radio protocol that shares the Bluetooth brand and spectrum with Bluetooth Classic but is built around short bursts: a device wakes, advertises or exchanges a few bytes, and goes back to sleep. Data is organized as services and characteristics in the GATT profile, so a phone app can read a temperature or write a setting using a well-known structure.
That design is why BLE dominates wearables, beacons, smart locks and medical sensors: the radio is cheap, every smartphone supports it, and a coin cell can last a long time. The trade-offs are modest throughput and short range, though Bluetooth Mesh and the long-range coded PHY in Bluetooth 5 extend both for building-scale deployments. Bluetooth LE for IoT goes deeper.
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