DisruptaBLE: Opportunistic BLE Networking

Abstract

Bluetooth Low Energy (BLE) is the prevalent IoT radio technology and perfectly suited for mobile and battery-driven applications. However, it is not designed for intermittent connectivity and opportunistic networking. Hence, the vast infrastructure that BLE-equipped devices such as smartphones, wearables, and sensors provide, remains untapped, even with its potential for data collection, sharing, or emergency communication in disaster scenarios. This paper introduces DISRUPTABLE to unfold this potential: A universal BLE-based store-and-forward architecture for delay-tolerant and opportunistic networking. Tailored to the resource constraints of IoT nodes and the feature set of BLE, DISRUPTABLE enables opportunistic interactions between BLE-equipped devices, providing a resilient network even when established communication over cellular networks or Wi-Fi fails. In our evaluation, we show that in a highly dynamic pedestrian scenario in downtown Stockholm, broadcasts reliably inform pedestrians in 7.1 seconds, while unicast messages arrive within 20 minutes in 48.1% of cases.