The Bluetooth Mesh Standard: An Overview and Experimental Evaluation

TLDR

Mesh networks enable multi‑hop, many‑to‑many communication, and BLE‑based mesh has been pursued for IoT but lacked interoperability until the Bluetooth Mesh standard was introduced. The paper aims to provide a detailed overview of the Bluetooth Mesh standard’s operation and performance, and to evaluate it through experimental, statistical, and graph‑based simulation studies. Performance is assessed using three complementary approaches: a laboratory experimental evaluation, a statistical analysis of network metrics, and a graph‑based simulation model. All three approaches yield consistent results, confirming the standard’s effectiveness, while also revealing potential drawbacks and open research issues.

Abstract

Mesh networks enable a many-to-many relation between nodes, which means that each node in the network can communicate with every other node using multi-hop communication and path diversity. As it enables the fast roll-out of sensor and actuator networks, it is an important aspect within the Internet of Things (IoT). Utilizing Bluetooth Low Energy (BLE) as an underlying technology to implement such mesh networks has gained a lot of interest in recent years. The result was a variety of BLE meshing solutions that were not interoperable because of the lack of a common standard. This has changed recently with the advent of the Bluetooth Mesh standard. However, a detailed overview of how this standard operates, performs and how it tackles other issues concerning BLE mesh networking is missing. Therefore, this paper investigates this new technology thoroughly and evaluates its performance by means of three approaches, namely an experimental evaluation, a statistical approach and a graph-based simulation model, which can be used as the basis for future research. Apart from showing that consistent results are achieved by means of all three approaches, we also identify possible drawbacks and open issues that need to be dealt with.