A Rapid Flooding Approach Based on Adaptive Delay and Low-Power Sleep for BLE Mesh Networks

Bluetooth Low Energy Mesh (BLE Mesh) is a promising protocol to interconnect massive transceivers in a low-power, high-flexibility and wide-coverage way. It applies managed flooding to realize efficient many-to-many communication, especially in the small packet scenario. However, the traditional approaches usually generate too much redundant packets, resulting in severe collision and even broadcast storm. Related works deal with this problem mainly from the aspects of transmission mode, probabilistic broadcast and node selection. These algorithms decrease the redundancy a lot but often come at a considerable delay. In this paper, we propose a rapid flooding approach based on adaptive delay and low-power sleep(FADLS) for BLE Mesh, which adjusts the maximum random delay and relay sleep time adaptively, based on a lightweight neighbor information acquisition mechanism. The simulation results show that the FADLS algorithm reduces the broadcast collision and transmission delay effectively. In addition, the adaptability enables the algorithm more suitable for changing scales of BLE Mesh networks.