RESEMBLE: A Real-Time Stack for Synchronized Mesh Mobile Bluetooth Low Energy Networks

Abstract

Bluetooth Low Energy (BLE) is a wireless technology for low-power, low-cost and lowcomplexityshort-range communications. On top of the BLE stack, the Bluetooth Mesh profile canbe adopted to handle large networks with mesh topologies. BLE is a promising candidate for theimplemention of Industrial Wireless Sensor Networks (IWSNs), thanks to its wide diffusion (e.g., onsmartphones and tablets) and the lower cost of the devices compared to other wireless industrialcommunication technologies. However, neither the BLE nor the Bluetooth Mesh specifications canprovide real-time messages with bounded delays. To overcome this limitation, this work proposesRESEMBLE, a real-time stack developed on top of BLE that is able to realize low-cost IWSNs overmesh topologies. RESEMBLE offers support to both real-time and non-real-time communicationson the same network. Moreover, RESEMBLE provides clock synchronization, thus allowing forTime Division Multiple Access (TDMA) transmissions. The clock synchronization provided byRESEMBLE can be also exploited by the upper layers’ industrial applications to implement timecoordinatedactions.