Demystifying the Performance of Bluetooth Mesh: Experimental Evaluation and Optimization Adnan Aijaz, Aleksandar Stanoev, Dominic London, and Victor Marot Bristol Research and Innovation Laboratory, Toshiba Europe Ltd., Bristol, United Kingdom fi
[email protected] Abstract—Mesh connectivity is attractive for Internet-of- Advertising bearer GATT bearer Model Layer Advertising bearer (not relayed) Things (IoT) applications from various perspectives. The recent Foundation Model Layer Friendship messaging Bluetooth mesh specification provides a full-stack mesh net- Access Layer working solution, potentially for thousands of nodes. Although Node Bluetooth mesh has been adopted for various IoT applications, its Upper Transport Layer Relay node performance aspects are not extensively investigated in literature. Lower Transport Layer This paper provides an experimental evaluation of Bluetooth Friend node Network Layer mesh (using Nordic nRF52840 devices) with an emphasis on those Bearer Layer Low power node aspects which are not well-investigated in literature. Such aspects BLE Core Specification include evaluation of unicast and group modes, performance under different traffic patterns, impact of message segmentation, Fig. 1. System architecture and protocol stack of Bluetooth mesh. and most importantly, latency performance for perfect reliability. The paper also investigates performance enhancement of Blue- Despite growing success of Bluetooth mesh in industry, tooth mesh based on different techniques including parametric academic studies on its performance aspects portray a mixed adjustments, extended advertisements (introduced in Bluetooth 5.0), power control, and customized relaying. Results provide picture. One simulation-based study [3] identifies scalability insights into system-level performance of Bluetooth mesh while as its main limitation. Another study following analytic ap- clarifying various important issues identified in recent studies.