BlueSky: Realizing Buried Potential of Bluetooth to Sustain a Large-scale Multi-hop Network

TL;DR

BlueSky demonstrates that Bluetooth can be effectively used for large-scale multi-hop networks by addressing collision issues and providing a complete system solution, enabling high participation and reliable communication.

Contribution

This work introduces BlueSky, a novel system that enables large-scale Bluetooth multi-hop networks, overcoming previous limitations through new protocols and implementation.

Findings

Collision probability is manageable in low-overhead networks.

BlueSky achieves 90-95% node participation in large-scale deployments.

The system demonstrates negligible overhead and good network performance.

Abstract

Traditionally, Bluetooth has been deemed unsuitable for sustaining a large-scale multi-hop network. There are two main reasons: severe frequency channel collisions under a large-scale network and high complexity of designing an efficient formation protocol. In this work, we reconsider this viewpoint from a practical usability perspective and aim to realize the buried potential of Bluetooth. Firstly, we find that the collision probability under a low-overhead network is fairly small, which is acceptable for practical applications. Secondly, we propose BlueSky, a complete system solution to provide necessary networking functionalities for Bluetooth. In BlueSky, we develop a connection maintenance mechanism for mitigating the influence of collisions and a network formation protocol for reliable packet transmissions. We implement BlueSky on Windows Mobile using 100 commercial smartphones. Comprehensive usability evaluations demonstrate the negligible overheads of BlueSky and its good network performance. In particular, 90%-95% of the whole 100 nodes can participate in the communication smoothly.