Bluetooth Low Energy mesh network for power-limited, robust and reliable IoT services

Abstract

Bluetooth Low Energy (BLE) is an emerging wireless technology created for short-range control and monitoring applications that is becoming increasingly widespread among the Internet of Things (IoT) services because of its low-cost and low-energy consumption. In this paper, we propose a novel neighbor discovery scheme and failure recovery techniques for multi-path and single-path low-power and reliable BLE networks. By exploiting energy-efficient access control and fast and robust routing ideas with adaptive failure recovery, the proposed methods outperform the well-known flooding approach used by the BLE Mesh standard. We show varying improvements in packet latency and power consumption in event-driven simulations as network topology and traffic changes. The failure recovery approaches proposed are optimized and demonstrated during the simulations, showing the varying of the overall failure recovery latency and node power consumption in different use cases.