A Low-Cost RF Power Measurement System for Optimizing the Configuration of BLE Mesh Nodes

Nowadays, there is a significant occupancy of the 2.4 GHz Industrial, scientific and medical (ISM) band. Systems utilizing this band, such as wireless sensors based on the Bluetooth Mesh Protocol (BMP), must configure their parameters to enhance reliability, consumption, and delay. Given the abundance of interference, which is complex and continuously changing, selecting the optimal configuration parameters is not straightforward. Moreover, the standard does not propose any adaptive algorithm. This paper proposes a low-cost solution to adaptively determine the suitable transmit and scan channels and the appropriate number of retransmissions for Bluetooth Low Energy (BLE) mesh nodes by combining Radio Frequency (RF) power measurements and traffic analysis.