BLE Tree Networks for Sensor Devices in Internet of Things

We design an architecture that enables two BLE interfaces to cooperate on one device to fulfill the capability of the BLE mesh communication. Multiple devices in our system can form a BLE tree network and transmit packets among themselves. We also propose the design of the mechanism of network establishment, gateway joining, service discovery and message routing for the BLE tree network. The routing protocol is based on the identification numbers of nodes in the tree network and thus does not incur extra overhead in the communications. A system prototpye implemented using Raspberry Pi 3 is also proposed to demonstrate the feasibility of the system. The experimental results show that the BLE tree networks are effective in collecting and managing sensor data for Internet of Things (IoT) applications.