2019/10/08 by Raúl Rondón, Aamir Mahmood, Rondón, Raúl +5 · 1 citation
Computer Science · #Bluetooth and Wireless Communication Technologies #FOS: Computer and information sciences #FOS: Electrical engineering #Information Theory (cs.IT) #Networking and Internet Architecture (cs.NI) #Signal Processing (eess.SP) #electronic engineering #information engineering
paper · pdf · doi:10.48550/arxiv.1910.03345
openalex publication_date 2019/10/08 · openalex created_date 2022/07/28 · openalex updated_date 2026/07/28
This article evaluates the quality-of-service performance and scalability of\nthe recently released Bluetooth Mesh protocol and provides general guidelines\non its use and configuration. Through extensive simulations, we analyzed the\nimpact of the configuration of all the different protocol's parameters on the\nend-to-end reliability, delay, and scalability. In particular, we focused on\nthe structure of the packet broadcast process, which takes place in time\nintervals known as \Advertising Events and \Scanning Events.\nResults indicate a high degree of interdependence among all the different\ntiming parameters involved in both the scanning and the advertising processes\nand show that the correct operation of the protocol greatly depends on the\ncompatibility between their configurations. We also demonstrated that\nintroducing randomization in these timing parameters, as well as varying the\nduration of the \Advertising Events, reduces the drawbacks of the\nflooding propagation mechanism implemented by the protocol. Using data\ncollected from a real office environment, we also studied the behavior of the\nprotocol in the presence of WLAN interference. It was shown that Bluetooth Mesh\nis vulnerable to external interference, even when implementing the standardized\nlimitation of using only 3 out of the 40 Bluetooth Low Energy frequency\nchannels. We observed that the achievable average delay is relatively low, of\naround 250~ms for over 10 hops under the worst simulated network conditions.\nHowever, results proved that scalability is especially challenging for\nBluetooth Mesh since it is prone to broadcast storm, hindering the\ncommunication reliability for denser deployments.\n