Multihop data transfer service for Bluetooth Low Energy

Bluetooth Low Energy (BLE) is one of the recently developed protocols enabling energy-efficient short-range radio communication. One of limitations of BLE is the support for data transferring over only a single hop. In the paper, we suggest the mechanism enabling the multihop data transfers between the nodes in BLE networks. To ensure portability, the suggested mechanism is designed as BLE service, which uses only the integral components of BLE stack. We discuss in details the suggested multihop service, its implementation and present the results of evaluation, which confirm feasibility and reveal features of the suggested solution. To the best of our knowledge, this paper reports the first implementation of the multihop data transfer over the BLE networks.