Joint Topology Construction and Hybrid Routing Strategy on Load Balancing for Bluetooth Low Energy Networks

This study proposes a multiple mesh-ring (MMR) topology construction with a hybrid routing strategy for Bluetooth low energy (BLE) networks. To achieve the load-balancing network, three design phases, including leader selection, role decision, and scatternet formation, are executed to generate even MMR configurations. First, each master discovers its adjacent slaves to determine a coordinator. Second, the coordinator computes the desired number of piconets with even scatternet link connectivity and distributes the scatternet connection information for each master. Finally, each designated master connects with its associated nodes, including slaves, intrabridges, and interbridges to create the link balanced MMR scatternet. To jointly design an energy-efficient routing protocol for the MMR topology, a hybrid routing strategy is deployed to perform the shortest path routing inside the mesh-ring subnet, and self-routing through different mesh-ring layers. Simulation results demonstrate that the balanced MMR topology leads to a significant gain in terms of network transmission performance and network lifetime when compared to the conventional dual-ring tree (DRT) and cluster-based mesh (CBM) approaches for BLE networks.