Energy Efficient Algorithm for Multihop BLE Networks on Resource-Constrained Devices

Bluetooth Low Energy is a fast growing protocol which has gained wide acceptance during last years. Key features for this growth are its high data rate and its ultra low energy consumption, making it the perfect candidate for piconets. However, the lack of expandability without serious impact on its energy consumption profile, prevents its adoption on more complex systems which depend on long network lifetime. Thus, a lot of academic research has been focused on the solution of BLE expandability problem and BLE mesh has been introduced on the latest Bluetooth version. In our point of view, most of the related work cannot be efficiently implemented in networks which are mostly comprised of constrained-resource nodes. Thus, we propose a new energy efficient tree algorithm for BLE static constrained-resources networks, which achieves a longer network lifetime by both reducing as much as possible the number of needed connection events and balancing the energy dissipation in the network.