Reliable Sensor Data Gathering with Bluetooth Mesh: An Experimental Study

Bluetooth mesh is a recent addition to the IoT connectivity landscape. It provides a simple and efficient short-range wireless mesh networking solution. This paper evaluates the performance of a Bluetooth mesh-based IoT sensor data gath-ering network in a real-world office environment. It provides sug-gestions to improve the reliability of the data gathering process. Specifically, the effect of various Bluetooth mesh protocol-related and non-protocol-related parameters is evaluated. The protocol-related parameters explored in this paper include the Publish Retransmit Count (PRC), the Network Transmit Count (NTC), and the Relay Retransmit Count (RRC). The non-protocol-related parameters include the packet-sending randomization interval and the packet payload redundancy. Through extensive experiments, the results show that a high degree of reliability, 99%, can be achieved with a combined use of these parameters. These results provide insights and shed light on configuring a Bluetooth mesh network to achieve high reliability for sensor data gathering.