Networking solutions for connecting bluetooth low energy devices - a comparison

Abstract

The Bluetooth Low Energy (BLE) is an attractive solution for implementing low-cost, low power consumption, short-range wireless transmission technology and high flexibility wireless products, which working on standard coin-cell batteries for years. The original design of BLE is restricted to star topology networking, which limits network coverage and scalability. In contrast, other competing technologies like Wi-Fi and ZigBee overcome those constraints by supporting different topologies such as the tree and mesh network topologies. This paper presents a part of the researchers’ efforts in designing solutions to enable BLE mesh networks and implements a tree network topology which is not supported in the standard BLE specifications. In addition, it discusses the advantages and drawbacks of the existing BLE network solutions. During analyzing the existing solutions, we highlight currently open issues such as flooding-based and routing-based solutions to allow end-to-end data transmission in a BLE mesh network and connecting BLE devices to the internet to support the Internet of Things (IoT). The approach proposed in this paper combines the default BLE star topology with the flooding based mesh topology to create a new hybrid network topology. The proposed approach can extend the network coverage without using any routing protocol.