BLUES. A self-organizing BLE mesh-network paradigm for IoT environments

The introduction of new key features into the core specification of Bluetooth Low Energy (BLE) increased its potentialities, thus paving the way to the development of new networking paradigms. The ability for a single node to participate in more than a piconet and to assume both the role of master and slave makes it possible the formation of multi-hop networks that can be used in several emerging application scenarios. Additionally, the inherent low power consumption at the cost of contained throughput makes this technology appealing for Internet of Things (IoT), where power memory and capacity constrained devices exchange messages at relatively low data rates. In this paper, we devise a two layers BLE mesh-based networking paradigm obtained by generalizing Android BE-MESH for hardware-independent sensor networks. Each node enforces a plug-and-play architecture which makes it able to autonomously switch between client and server role, discover and connect to existing scatternets and relay messages through them, making the network able to extend and self re-organize in a distributed fashion. To have our implementation ready for IoT systems we based it on the ESP32 off-the-shelf board. We describe both the implemented functions as well as some practical results proving the effectiveness of the framework in some tested configurations.