Bluetooth now or low energy: Should BLE mesh become a flooding or connection oriented network? (original) (raw)
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From Sensor Networks to Internet of Things. Bluetooth Low Energy, a Standard for This Evolution
Sensors (Basel, Switzerland), 2017
Current sensor networks need to be improved and updated to satisfy new essential requirements of the Internet of Things, where cutting-edge applications will appear. These requirements are: total coverage, zero fails (high performance), scalability and sustainability (hardware and software). We are going to evaluate Bluetooth Low Energy as wireless transmission technology and as the ideal candidate for these improvements, due to its low power consumption, its low cost radio chips and its ability to communicate with users directly, using their smartphones or smartbands. However, this technology is relatively recent, and standard network topologies are not able to fulfil its new requirements. To address these shortcomings, the implementation of other more flexible topologies (as the mesh topology) will be very interesting. After studying it in depth, we have identified certain weaknesses, for example, specific devices are needed to provide network scalability, and the need to choose b...
Bluetooth Mesh Analysis, Issues, and Challenges
IEEE Access
BLE is a widely used short-range technology which has gained a relevant position inside the Internet-of-Things (IoT) paradigm development thanks to its simplicity, low-power consumption, lowcost and robustness. New enhancements over BLE have focused on supporting mesh network topology. Compared to other mesh networks, BLE mesh has only considered a managed flooding protocol in its first version. Managed flooding may generally seem inefficient in many contexts, but it is a high desirable option when data transmission is urgent, the network is small or its configuration changes in a very dynamic way. Knowing the interest to many application contexts, this paper analyses the impact of tweaking several features over the reliability and efficiency of the mesh network. These features are configured and controlled in different layers: message repetition schemes, the transmission randomization, the election of a scheme based on an acknowledged or unacknowledged transmission, etc. In order to estimate the real performance of a mesh network deployment, this paper evaluates the effects of the interaction of the chosen parameters, their appropriate adjustment in relation with the characteristics of real implementations and the true overhead related to the whole protocol stack. The paper identifies configuration challenges, proposes network tuning criteria and outlines possible standard improvements. For this purpose, a detailed assessment on the implementation and execution of real devices has been performed with their chipset limitations. INDEX TERMS Bluetooth low energy, wireless mesh networks, BLE mesh, managed flooding, performance.
An Energy Balanced Flooding Algorithm for a BLE Mesh Network
IEEE Access
This paper presents a proposal for a balanced flooding protocol for mesh networks over BLE (Bluetooth Low Energy). The primary goal is to save battery lifetime by converting nodes into a mesh network in a balanced mode and thus increasing the lifetime of the network. Based on an extension of the flooding protocol Trickle, the proposed protocol, Drypp, aims to balance the loads of the network nodes. Hence it seeks to make nodes with a higher load more active in the network in comparison to nodes with a lower load. A performance analysis will be executed, comparing the proposed protocol and Trickle. The metrics of node lifetime, network lifetime, throughput and node battery loads will be analyzed.
Eastern-European Journal of Enterprise Technologies
Bluetooth uses 2.4 GHz in ISM (industrial, scientific, and medical) band, which it shares with other wireless operating system technologies like ZigBee and WLAN. The Bluetooth core design comprises a low-energy version of a low-rate wireless personal area network and supports point-to-point or point-to-multipoint connections. The aim of the study is to develop a Bluetooth mesh flooding and to estimate packet delivery ratio in wireless sensor networks to model asynchronous transmissions including a visual representation of a mesh network, node-related statistics, and a packet delivery ratio (PDR). This work provides a platform for Bluetooth networking by analyzing the flooding of the network layers and configuring the architecture of a multi-node Bluetooth mesh. Five simulation scenarios have been presented to evaluate the network flooding performance. These scenarios have been performed over an area of 200×200 meters including 81 randomly distributed nodes including different Relay/...
RESEMBLE: A Real-Time Stack for Synchronized Mesh Mobile Bluetooth Low Energy Networks
Applied System Innovation
Bluetooth Low Energy (BLE) is a wireless technology for low-power, low-cost and lowcomplexity short-range communications. On top of the BLE stack, the Bluetooth Mesh profile can be adopted to handle large networks with mesh topologies. BLE is a promising candidate for the implemention of Industrial Wireless Sensor Networks (IWSNs), thanks to its wide diffusion (e.g., on smartphones and tablets) and the lower cost of the devices compared to other wireless industrial communication technologies. However, neither the BLE nor the Bluetooth Mesh specifications can provide real-time messages with bounded delays. To overcome this limitation, this work proposes RESEMBLE, a real-time stack developed on top of BLE that is able to realize low-cost IWSNs over mesh topologies. RESEMBLE offers support to both real-time and non-real-time communications on the same network. Moreover, RESEMBLE provides clock synchronization, thus allowing for Time Division Multiple Access (TDMA) transmissions. The cl...
Data Transmission Efficiency in Bluetooth Low Energy Versions
Sensors, 2019
One important aspect when choosing a Bluetooth Low Energy (BLE) solution is to analyze its energy consumption for various connection parameters and desired throughput to build an optimal low-power Internet-of-Things (IoT) application and to extend the battery life. In this paper, energy consumption and data throughput for various BLE versions are studied. We have tested the effect of connection interval on the throughput and compared power efficiency relating to throughput for various BLE versions and different transactions. The presented results reveal that shorter connection intervals increase throughput for read/write transactions, but that is not the case for the notify and read/write without response transactions. Furthermore, for each BLE version, the energy consumption is mainly dependable on the data volume. The obtained results provide a design guideline for implementing an optimal BLE IoT application.
The Bluetooth Mesh Standard: An Overview and Experimental Evaluation
Sensors, 2018
Mesh networks enable a many-to-many relation between nodes, which means that each node in the network can communicate with every other node using multi-hop communication and path diversity. As it enables the fast roll-out of sensor and actuator networks, it is an important aspect within the Internet of Things (IoT). Utilizing Bluetooth Low Energy (BLE) as an underlying technology to implement such mesh networks has gained a lot of interest in recent years. The result was a variety of BLE meshing solutions that were not interoperable because of the lack of a common standard. This has changed recently with the advent of the Bluetooth Mesh standard. However, a detailed overview of how this standard operates, performs and how it tackles other issues concerning BLE mesh networking is missing. Therefore, this paper investigates this new technology thoroughly and evaluates its performance by means of three approaches, namely an experimental evaluation, a statistical approach and a graph-ba...
Buffer management policies for BLE-based multi-hop communication
2014
Bluetooth Low Energy (BLE) has gained a lot of popularity since its introduction in the Bluetooth Core 4.0 standards, mainly due to its compatibility with modern smartphones. BLE provides low energy and low cost solution for low data rate wireless communication. To reduce complexity, BLE supports only peer-to-peer, master-slave communication. This proves to be a roadblock in its application in many moderately large wireless sensor network (WSNs) applications where line of sight communication is not sufficient. We tackle this problem by introducing multi-hop communication over BLE. This work proposes a novel routing mechanism and data transfer functionality over BLE radio and link layer, which is tested with an actual implementation on custom hardware from IMEC. The data transfer in BLE over multiple hops is essentially a series of connection events where each connection event can transfer large amount of data to its neighboring node resulting in each node storing large amount of dat...
An All-wireless SDN Framework for BLE Mesh
ACM Transactions on Internet of Things, 2020
The Internet of Things (IoT) paradigm combines the interconnection of massive amounts of battery-constrained and low-computational-power devices with low-latency and high-reliability network requirements. Additionally, diverse end-to-end services and applications with different Quality of Service (QoS) requirements are expected to coexist in the same network infrastructure. Software-defined Networking (SDN) is a paradigm designed to solve these problems, but its implementation in wireless networks and especially in the resource-constrained IoT systems is extremely challenging and has seen very limited adoption, since it requires isolation of data and control plane information flows and a reliable and scalable control plane. In this work, Bluetooth Low Energy (BLE) mesh is introduced as an adequate technology for an all-wireless SDN-BLE implementation, which is a technology that has become the de-facto standard for IoT. The proposed SDN-BLE framework uses a routing network slice for ...