Concurrent Transmissions for Multi-hop Bluetooth 5

Paper in proceeding, 2019

Bluetooth is an omnipresent communication technology, available on billions of connected devices today.
While it has been traditionally limited to peer-to-peer and star network topology, the recent Bluetooth 5 standard introduces new operating modes to allow for increased reliability and Bluetooth Mesh supports multi-hop networking based on message flooding.
In this paper, we present BlueFlood.
It adapts concurrent transmissions, as introduced by Glossy, to Bluetooth.
The result is fast and efficient network-wide data dissemination in multi-hop Bluetooth networks.
Moreover, we show that BlueFlood floods can be reliably received by off-the-shelf Bluetooth devices such as smart phones, opening new applications of concurrent transmissions and seamless integration with existing technologies.

We present an in-depth experimental feasibility study of concurrent transmissions over Bluetooth PHY in a controlled environment.
Further, we build a small-scale testbed where we evaluate BlueFlood in real-world settings of a residential environment.
We show that BlueFlood achieves 99% end-to-end delivery ratio in multi-hop networks with a duty cycle of 0.13% for 1-second intervals.