BlueFlood: Concurrent Transmissions for Multi-Hop Bluetooth 5 -- Modeling and Evaluation

TL;DR

This paper evaluates the feasibility of concurrent transmissions in Bluetooth 5, models their effects, and introduces BlueFlood, a protocol that enables efficient multi-hop data dissemination with high reliability and low duty-cycle.

Contribution

It provides the first comprehensive analysis and experimental validation of concurrent transmissions in Bluetooth 5, and proposes BlueFlood for efficient multi-hop communication.

Findings

BlueFlood achieves 99.9% end-to-end delivery ratio.

Concurrent transmissions are feasible over Bluetooth PHY.

BlueFlood works with off-the-shelf devices like smartphones.

Abstract

Bluetooth is an omnipresent technology, available on billions of devices today. While it has been traditionally limited to peer-to-peer communication and star networks, the recent Bluetooth Mesh standard extends it to multi-hop networking. In addition, the Bluetooth 5 standard introduces new modes to allow for increased reliability. In this paper, we evaluate the feasibility of concurrent transmissions (CT) in Bluetooth via modeling and controlled experiments and then devise an efficient network-wide data dissemination protocol, BlueFlood, based on CT for multi-hop Bluetooth networks. First, we model and analyze how CT distorts the received waveform and characterize the Bit Error Rate of a Frequency-Shift Keying receiver to show that CT is feasible over Bluetooth. Second, we verify our analytic results with a controlled experimental study of CT over Bluetooth PHY. Third, we present BlueFlood, a fast and efficient network-wide data dissemination in multi-hop Bluetooth networks. In our experimental evaluation, in two testbeds deployed in university buildings, we show that BlueFlood achieves 99.9% end-to-end delivery ratio with a duty-cycle of 0.4% for periodic dissemination of advertising packets of 38 bytes with 200 milliseconds intervals at 2 Mbps. Moreover, we show that BlueFlood can be received by off-the-shelf devices such as smartphones, paving a seamless integration with existing technologies.