An Adaptive Duty Cycling Mechanism for Energy Efficiency in Bluetooth Mesh Networks
Sheida Mehrazi, Majid Nabi · 2024
The Bluetooth Mesh (BM) standard was released in 2017 to expand the application of the Bluetooth Low Energy (BLE) technology for larger-scale multi-hop Internet-of-Things (IoT) networks. To implement multi-hop data delivery, BM defines a relay feature for BLE nodes using a controlled flooding algorithm for data dissemination. By default, the relay nodes persistently scan the advertising channels to receive packets from their neighbors and broadcast. However, it has a big impact on the energy consumption and lifetime of the relay nodes, especially when they have limited energy resources. On the other hand, any constant and homogeneous setting of a duty cycle for relay nodes across the network leads to inefficient performance since the nodes can be in different spatial and temporal conditions. This paper proposes a run-time adaptive duty-cycling mechanism for relay nodes to reduce unnecessary energy consumption and yet collaboratively make a reliable end-to-end data delivery. Each relay node independently decides about its suitable duty cycle based on its local conditions. The proposed method is evaluated using a publicly available BM simulator, showing a significant reduction in energy consumption (up to 57% in the conducted experiments) while preserving the packet delivery performance of the network.