Demo: Synchronous Transmission Based Flooding over Bluetooth 5.0 for Industrial Wireless Applications

The release of Bluetooth 5.0 and the Mesh standards has undoubtedly positioned Bluetooth as a leading wireless technology for the Internet of Things. The doubling of the physical data rate of Bluetooth Low Energy (BLE) from 1Mbps to 2Mbps and the support of multihop mesh connectivity enable low-latency communication over multi-hop networks. At the onset of these important developments, we first implement synchronous transmissions based flooding primitives over the new 2Mbps BLE physical layer and then benchmark it against the latest Bluetooth Mesh standard. Our real testbed results show multiple orders of magnitude lower latency than the standard protocol with a 99.95% reliability. We then demonstrate our ultra-fast flooding primitive as a wire-replacement technology for an autonomous warehouse scenario that requires synchronized coordination of multiple robots.