The most likely reason that there is little interest in researching Bluetooth 3.0 (although there are more than 20,000 articles in Google Scholar from a search query of Bluetooth 3), is because the technology is old (released in 2009), limited range (5 - 30m), slow (1Mbps), still had an annoying range of bugs, including connectivity issues, and all the good bits like Enhanced Data Rate (EDR), which doubled effective data transfer rate and High Speed (HS), which can increase theoretical speed to 24 Mbps utilising a co-located 802.11 link, are optional. Wifi was far more powerful, with greater range, and simpler connectivity.
Bluetooth 4.0 became a much better proposition when it was released in 2010, which included Classic Bluetooth, Bluetooth High Speed and Bluetooth Low Energy protocols. By the time Bluetooth 4.2 was released in 2014, it specifically targeted IoT devices, which made it far more interesting, although it too, has been superceded by Bluetooth 5.0 which was released in 2016, offering quadruple the range, double the speed, and providing an eight-fold increase in data broadcasting capacity of low energy Bluetooth connections, in addition to adding functionality for connectionless services like location-relevant information and navigation.
For low data accumulation IoT applications, Bluetooth 5.0 will be very interesting, due to the low energy consumption, cheap costs and ease of data aggregation and onward transfer, so I would expect this is where researchers will be looking for the future.
The most likely reason that there is little interest in researching Bluetooth 3.0 (although there are more than 20,000 articles in Google Scholar from a search query of Bluetooth 3), is because the technology is old (released in 2009), limited range (5 - 30m), slow (1Mbps), still had an annoying range of bugs, including connectivity issues, and all the good bits like Enhanced Data Rate (EDR), which doubled effective data transfer rate and High Speed (HS), which can increase theoretical speed to 24 Mbps utilising a co-located 802.11 link, are optional. Wifi was far more powerful, with greater range, and simpler connectivity.
Bluetooth 4.0 became a much better proposition when it was released in 2010, which included Classic Bluetooth, Bluetooth High Speed and Bluetooth Low Energy protocols. By the time Bluetooth 4.2 was released in 2014, it specifically targeted IoT devices, which made it far more interesting, although it too, has been superceded by Bluetooth 5.0 which was released in 2016, offering quadruple the range, double the speed, and providing an eight-fold increase in data broadcasting capacity of low energy Bluetooth connections, in addition to adding functionality for connectionless services like location-relevant information and navigation.
For low data accumulation IoT applications, Bluetooth 5.0 will be very interesting, due to the low energy consumption, cheap costs and ease of data aggregation and onward transfer, so I would expect this is where researchers will be looking for the future.