Selection of relay nodes in Bluetooth Mesh network for smart home application

Abstract

Bluetooth mesh (BM) is increasingly growing and appearing in Internet of Things (IoT) systems. BM uses a managed flooding mechanism to transmit the message. Nodes with a relay feature will receive and forward the message to neighboring nodes, so that the message can be spread to the whole network. The default configuration of BM is that all nodes are relays, ensuring that every node in the network can connect to each other. However, when all nodes act as relays, it results in a lot of messages being transmitted through the network at a time, which increases the possibility of packet collisions, thereby reducing the packet delivery rate (PDR) and increasing the end-to-end delay (E2E delay). These issues will greatly affect the user experience, especially in smart home systems where users interact near the device. Therefore, it is necessary to choose the relay nodes in the network appropriately to improve the quality of the network. This paper will select and analyze some relay node selection algorithms in the BM network applied in the smart home system, and compare them with the default configuration of the network (all relays) in terms of PDR and E2E delay criteria.