BMSim: An Event-Driven Simulator for Performance Evaluation of Bluetooth Mesh Networks

Bluetooth mesh (BM) is one of the promising networking technologies for Internet-of-Things (IoT) networks released by Bluetooth SIG in 2017. BM provides a protocol for multihop scalable networking of IoT devices over the widely used Bluetooth low energy (BLE) technology. However, the capabilities and limits of this technology are not fully studied to determine the IoT applications for which this technology can be used. One of the barriers toward this is the lack of a suitable BM network simulator for performance investigations under various conditions and settings. This article presents a full-fledged open-source event-driven simulator (BMSim) for the performance evaluation of BM networks. The accuracy of the developed simulator is verified by real experiments. Also, BMSim is used to perform a comprehensive investigation of the performance of the BM protocol in various network conditions and configuration settings. The impact of several configuration parameters on the BM network performance is studied. Since the simulator is capable of simulating dynamic networks and run-time configurations, a BM network with node mobility is also investigated. The results reveal the importance and necessity of proper BM parameter configuration mechanisms to achieve the required Quality-of-Service and network efficiency.