Abstract
The Bluetooth Low Energy (BLE) is an attractive solution for implementing low-cost, low power consumption, short-range wireless transmission technology and high flexibility wireless products, which working on standard coin-cell batteries for years. The original design of BLE is restricted to star topology networking, which limits network coverage and scalability. In contrast, other competing technologies like Wi-Fi and ZigBee overcome those constraints by supporting different topologies such as the tree and mesh network topologies. This paper presents a part of the researchers’ efforts in designing solutions to enable BLE mesh networks and implements a tree network topology which is not supported in the standard BLE specifications. In addition, it discusses the advantages and drawbacks of the existing BLE network solutions. During analyzing the existing solutions, we highlight currently open issues such as flooding-based and routing-based solutions to allow end-to-end data transmission in a BLE mesh network and connecting BLE devices to the internet to support the Internet of Things (IoT). The approach proposed in this paper combines the default BLE star topology with the flooding based mesh topology to create a new hybrid network topology. The proposed approach can extend the network coverage without using any routing protocol.
Highlights
Wireless sensor networks (WSNs) are a group of connected sensors used for collecting, recording and monitoring the physical parameters of the environment and sending the collected data to a central device
Indoor positioning systems using Internet of Things (IoT) technology can solve the limitation of the other similar technologies such as, Global Navigation Satellite System (GNSS)and Radio Frequency Identification (RFID) technologies [36,37],where GPS stops working on indoor environments while RFID does not have enough bandwidth for large-scale Location-based services (LBS)[35]
Different networking solutions for connecting Bluetooth Low Energy devices which are embedded in wireless sensor networks and mobile devices have been discussed
Summary
Wireless sensor networks (WSNs) are a group of connected sensors used for collecting, recording and monitoring the physical parameters of the environment and sending the collected data to a central device. It is impossible to configure more complex network topology depending only on the basic BLE specifications [2], and in turn, the coverage area and scalability of the network is limited.WSN configurations can be one of the Star, Mesh, and Tree topologies or a mixed form. An important issue of research in wireless networks is to dynamically organize the nodes into a wireless network and route the data from the source to the destination The former BLE based networks do not perform routing, but its devices broadcast packets through the network over BLE advertising channels which is called flooding techniques [4]. The new hybrid network topology makes use of the simplicity of creating BLE star topology with the power of broadcasting messages using the flooding based mesh topology without any routing technique.
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