Bluetooth-based tree topology network for wireless industrial applications

As the recent development of low power communication techniques, IoT applications have been implemented using various communication method. Among them, the Bluetooth Low Energy(BLE) which has been widely adopted in the most of smartphone plays a major communication channel for the range of industrial applications as well as the personal applications. However, since BLE supports only the star topology, it is impossible to configure more complex network topologies, and, in turn, the coverage of the network is limited. In this paper, we propose a method to implement the tree topology network using the BLE. By switching the mode of the BLE module in each network node, it can communicate between nodes at the different layers of the tree topology. Using this approach, the coverage of BLE can be extended widely to other wireless sensor network. The approach proposed in this paper can enable BLE as well as the wireless sensor network(WSN) be used for IoT applications.