The King is Dead Long Live the King! Towards Systematic Performance Evaluation of Heterogeneous Bluetooth Mesh Networks in Real World Environments

Wireless networks based on Bluetooth mesh (BM) promise a variety of Internet of Things applications from health-care monitoring to smart buildings. BM introduces a novel network concept that supports up to 32767 devices and 127 hops. So far no readily available dataset or toolset exists to perform systematic in-depth performance analysis of this standard. In this paper, we present insights on the performance and practical usability of BM. We conduct realistic smart office experiments with heterogeneous devices distributed throughout an area of approximately 1100m
²
. By varying network parameters and BM node features, we collect the first public available BM dataset. Based on our experience, the use of current implementations is error-prone due to the complexity of BM. To facilitate researchers to conduct further experiments, we propose a toolset to configure and systematically evaluate BM performance. Finally we discuss several pitfalls that should be avoided in designing and deploying such networks.