An Experimental Performance Evaluation of Bluetooth Mesh Technology for Monitoring Applications

The introduction of Bluetooth Low Energy (BLE) in 2010 provided constrained devices with a wireless point-to-point communication standard. It facilitates the creation of piconets and reducing product development time and cost. It is until 2017 that the Bluetooth special interest group releases the Mesh Profile allowing a multi-hop interconnection through BLE's advertisements. Being a relatively new technology, this paper aims to experimentally evaluate its performance and investigate the limits of the technology in terms of data delivery capacity in monitoring applications. Several experiments are performed by deploying a number of BLE nodes in an office environment, making a multi-hop network. The performance of the network in terms of packet delivery to a base station is measured in each experiment. Moreover, experiments including mobile nodes are carried out under the multi-hop setup to test the behaviour of the protocol when some nodes move around. The experimental results show that the relay nodes impose critical limitations for message delivery in multi-hop networks, limiting the usage of the BLM technology for many monitoring applications.