Concurrent Transmissions for Multi-Hop Bluetooth 5

Beshr Al Nahas, Simon Duquennoy, Olaf Landsiedel

Abstract: Bluetooth is an omnipresent communication technology, available on billions of connected devices today. While it has been traditionally limited to peer-to-peer and star network topology, the recent Bluetooth 5 standard introduces new operating modes to allow for increased reliability and Bluetooth Mesh supports multi-hop networking based on message flooding. In this paper, we present BlueFlood. It adapts concurrent transmissions, as introduced by Glossy, to Bluetooth. The result is fast and efficient network-wide data dissemination in multi-hop Bluetooth networks. Moreover, we show that BlueFlood floods can be reliably received by offthe-shelf Bluetooth devices such as smartphones, opening new applications of concurrent transmissions and a seamless integration with existing technologies. We present an in-depth experimental feasibility study of concurrent transmissions over Bluetooth PHY in a controlled environment. Further, we build a small-scale testbed where we evaluate BlueFlood in real-world settings of a residential environment. We show that BlueFlood achieves 99% end-toend delivery ratio in multi-hop networks with a duty cycle of 0.13% for 1-second intervals.