This article evaluates the quality-of-service performance and scalability of the recently released Bluetooth mesh protocol and provides general guidelines on its use and configuration. Through extensive simulations, we analyze the impact of the configuration of all the different protocol's parameters on the end-to-end reliability, delay, and scalability. In particular, we focus on the structure of the packet broadcast process, which takes place in time intervals known as Advertising Events and Scanning Events. Results indicate a high degree of interdependence among all the different timing parameters involved in both the scanning and the advertising processes and show that the correct operation of the protocol greatly depends on the compatibility between their configurations. We also demonstrate that introducing randomization in these timing parameters, as well as varying the duration of the Advertising Events, reduces the drawbacks of the flooding propagation mechanism implemented by the protocol. Using data collected from a real office environment, we also study the behavior of the protocol in the presence of WLAN interference. It is shown that Bluetooth mesh is vulnerable to external interference, even when implementing the standardized limitation of using only 3 out of the 40 Bluetooth low-energy frequency channels. We observe that the achievable average delay is relatively low, of around 250 ms for over 10 hops under the worst simulated network conditions. However, results prove that scalability is especially challenging for Bluetooth mesh since it is prone to broadcast storm, hindering the communication reliability for denser deployments.

中文翻译：

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了解蓝牙 Mesh 的性能：可靠性、延迟和可扩展性分析


本文评估了最近发布的蓝牙网状网络协议的服务质量性能和可扩展性，并提供了有关其使用和配置的一般指南。通过大量的模拟，我们分析了所有不同协议参数的配置对端到端可靠性、延迟和可扩展性的影响。我们特别关注数据包广播过程的结构，该过程发生在称为广告事件和扫描事件的时间间隔中。结果表明扫描和广告过程中涉及的所有不同定时参数之间存在高度的相互依赖性，并表明协议的正确操作很大程度上取决于它们配置之间的兼容性。我们还证明，在这些定时参数中引入随机化以及改变广告事件的持续时间，可以减少协议实现的洪泛传播机制的缺点。使用从真实办公环境收集的数据，我们还研究了存在 WLAN 干扰时协议的行为。结果表明，即使实现仅使用 40 个蓝牙低功耗频道中的 3 个的标准化限制，蓝牙网状网络也容易受到外部干扰。我们观察到，在最差的模拟网络条件下，可实现的平均延迟相对较低，超过 10 跳的延迟约为 250 毫秒。然而，结果证明，可扩展性对于蓝牙网状网络来说尤其具有挑战性，因为它容易出现广播风暴，从而阻碍更密集部署的通信可靠性。