QualityBLE: A QoS Aware Implementation for BLE Mesh Networks

TL;DR

This paper introduces a QoS method for BLE Mesh networks that prioritizes data packets without modifying the protocol, validated through extensive measurements in a healthcare scenario.

Contribution

It presents a novel QoS implementation for BLE Mesh that requires no protocol modifications and demonstrates its effectiveness through real-world measurements.

Findings

Prioritized data transmission improves network performance.

The solution works in single and multi-channel scenarios.

Guidelines for further QoS research in BLE Mesh networks.

Abstract

Bluetooth Low Energy (BLE) Mesh is widely recognized as a driver technology for IoT applications. However, the lack of quality of service (QoS) in BLE Mesh, represented by packet prioritization, significantly limits its potential. This work implements a quality-of-service (QoS) method for BLE Mesh to prioritize the data packets and provide them with different network transmission settings according to their assigned priority. Unlike existing works on QoS for BLE Mesh, our proposed approach does not require any modifications to the BLE Mesh protocol and can be smoothly adopted in existing BLE Mesh networks. We conducted an extensive measurement campaign to evaluate our solution over a 15-node BLE Mesh network deployed to emulate a smart healthcare scenario where 45 sensors with an assigned priority transmit information over the network. The experiments provide performance results for single and multi channel network scenarios. The obtained results validate our solution, showing the difference between the established priorities and providing insights and guidelines to conduct further research on QoS over BLE Mesh and broadcast-based networks.