A Novel Overlay Mesh with Bluetooth Low Energy Network

While Bluetooth Low Energy (BLE) beacons have been massively deployed to broadcast their advertising packets to any receivers in their vicinity, it is relatively difficult, if not impossible, for a beacon to report the packet back to the server in the absence of a receiver. This paper proposes a novel BLE-based overlay mesh (BOM) that enables the mesh functionality to existing beacon networks without introducing new infrastructure. However, it is an elusive challenge to jointly manage the beaconing and flooding events. To this end, BOM employs 1) best-effort scheduling (BES) to minimize the packet collision rate (PCR) while scheduling the time slots for beaconing events, and 2) received signal strength (RSS)-based bounded flooding (RBF) to maximize the packet delivery ratio (PDR) for the advertising packet while forwarding the relaying packet across the BOM network. Extensive simulations indicate the substantial performance gain of our proposed approach in comparison to the legacy approaches. Specifically, BES reduces the PCR to 66.67%, whereas RBF improves the PDR for the advertising packet to 52% while maintaining approximately the same PDR for the relaying packet. The practical experiment with a real network testbed further demonstrates the feasibility of BOM.