RouMBLE: A Sink-Oriented Routing Protocol for BLE Mesh Networks

In Internet of Things (IoT)-like contexts, there is often the need to leverage traffic routing mechanisms among heterogeneous devices, especially when classical (and well-known) addressing paradigms cannot be adopted or supported by constrained IoT devices deployed on the field (e.g., due to memory footprint, internal limitations, etc.). This is even more true (and necessary) when nodes interact in unstructured networks (e.g., mesh-like) lacking a specific topology (e.g., exploiting flooding approaches to transfer information) and external “smart” devices should be allowed to interact with these networks. To this end, in this article a multisink routing protocol, denoted as routing on mesh Bluetooth low energy (RouMBLE), is proposed. Our implementation relies on Bluetooth low-energy advertisement channels and allows sink nodes to control topology formation and data collection (with both unicast and broadcast communications), with nodes identified with compressed addresses. A relevant experimental application to environmental lighting management is presented.