Mobile Bluetooth Mesh Networks: Performance Evaluation of a Novel Concept

The Bluetooth special interest group (SIG) released Bluetooth mesh (BM) as a potential networking technology for Internet of Things (IoT) networks. The use of BM technology in various applications has become increasingly popular. However, most BM studies in the literature assume networks comprising only static nodes or a low number of mobile devices. In this article, we introduce and explore the novel concept of mobile BM networks (MBMNs), which are composed of BM-enabled mobile devices, such as smartphones carried by people. MBMNs can be created opportunistically in a wide range of environments and for various purposes. We argue that MBMNs can be a proper networking solution for many applications, thanks to the native support of topology dynamics by the flooding-based end-to-end data delivery of the protocol. This article presents and evaluates the performance of MBMNs and explores the impact of various conditions and parameters on these networks. Additionally, we conduct real-world experiments to demonstrate that MBMNs are feasible and offer relatively good performance.