BlueFlood: Concurrent Transmissions for Multi-Hop Bluetooth 5 – Modeling and Evaluation
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Bluetooth is an omnipresent communication technology, available on billions of connected devices today. While it has been traditionally limited to peer-to-peer and star network topology, the recent Bluetooth 5 standard introduces new operating modes to allow for increased reliability. In addition, Bluetooth Mesh supports multi-hop networking based on message flooding. In this paper, we present BlueFlood. It adapts synchronous concurrent transmissions (CT), as introduced by Glossy, to Bluetooth. The result is fast and efficient network-wide data dissemination in multi-hop Bluetooth networks. Moreover, we show that BlueFlood floods can be reliably received by off-the-shelf Bluetooth devices such as smartphones, opening new applications of concurrent transmissions and a seamless integration with existing technologies. We model and analyze how CT distort the received waveform and characterize the Bit Error Rate (BER) of a non-coherent Frequency-Shift Keying (FSK) receiver trying to recover the original bitstream. Then, we present an in-depth experimental feasibility study of CT over Bluetooth PHY in a controlled environment. Further, we evaluate BlueFlood in two testbeds deployed in university buildings. We show that BlueFlood achieves 99.9 multi-hop networks with a duty cycle of 0.4 advertising packets of 38 bytes with 200 milliseconds intervals.
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