Abstract
Bluetooth mesh is a recent technology built on the Bluetooth low energy protocol stack architecture, focusing on the Internet of Things. It represents an excellent solution for commercial and industrial lighting applications, though it is still evolving. One of the biggest challenges of the Bluetooth mesh network is the improvement of confirmation messages reception. In a Bluetooth mesh network, determining the Status of the received messages is a critical aspect that can generate unexpected issues when multiple devices respond simultaneously, as it may occur in some lighting applications. This behavior can reduce the probability of message delivery due to collisions, especially when the number of devices in the network increases. This article aims to improve the reliability in receiving confirmation messages in a Bluetooth mesh network by proposing a new technique of spreading Status overtime. To evaluate the proposed technique’s performance, we compare our technique with a Bluetooth mesh network with standard configuration (SC) using real nodes experimental setup. We evaluated our results in terms of packet-loss rate, obtaining 98.84% of the Status received for the network with our optimized configuration and 96.98% for those with the SC. Finally, an in-depth performance evaluation method for the analysis of the lost Status was also conducted.
Highlights
B LUETOOTH Low Energy (BLE) was introduced in the 4.0 version of the Bluetooth specification in 2010 [1], where a new technology and effective protocol that has achieved a strong impact on the market today was proposed
Considering the overall results for each node (Table II) and averaged for all 10 tests, we obtained, in the worst case of the standard configuration (SC) test, an average of 95.84% Status messages received by the client from node one, whereas the best result was achieved by node two, with a 98.26% of Status messages correctly delivered
Considering the overall results obtained for each test, on the average between all the nodes, the SC test shows, the worst result, with an average of 95.60% for the Status messages received by the client in test one, and the best result achieved in test seven, with 97.55% of Status messages correctly delivered
Summary
B LUETOOTH Low Energy (BLE) was introduced in the 4.0 version of the Bluetooth specification in 2010 [1], where a new technology and effective protocol that has achieved a strong impact on the market today was proposed. The limitation of the BLE design was that it is based on point-to-point interaction, the network size of the star-based topology, may be limited It is a common trend in most recent applications to observe an important increase in the number of devices in networks with mesh topology. BLE low-power competitors such as ZigBee [9], Thread [10] or custom solution [11] offer mesh capabilities running on the IEEE 802.15.4 in the 2.4 GHz band. In these cases, meshing enables a manyto-many topology, where each node in the network can talk to every other node, directly or via multi-hop communication, using routing techniques [12]. Lack of standardization has been recently resolved when the Bluetooth SIG group released in July 2017, a mesh network specification built on top of the BLE protocol stack which makes use of some concepts and functionalities as its advertising capabilities [14]
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