Establishing a mesh network with bluetooth and investigating the range analysis

Bluetooth is a technology that offers cheap and low energy solutions for the problems that are faced in the short-range wireless communications. With the last standard that is released which brought a new dimension to the short-range wireless communications, Bluetooth aims to solve the problems that arises in the market. As the concept of Internet of Things gets more common, it is aimed to connect more and more things to the internet. But the existing wireless modules do not have low power consumption and they are not low-cost devices, and this constitutes a problem. To overcome such problems, the mesh concept which was already being used in the existing wireless networks was adapted into Bluetooth technology by the Bluetooth Special Interest Group. Until the release of the Bluetooth Mesh Standard, it was only possible to establish such communications as one to one communiction and one to many communications, which is also called as beaconing. But to be able to send and receive data simultaniously was not supported and it has been supported just after the release of the Mesh Standard in a wider manner. When looked at the standards that were released before Bluetooth 4.0, it is noticed that the goal of short range and fast transmissions were aimed, and the low power consumption was not a concern in these standards. After the release of 4.0, the low power consumption modules were released to the market and aside from the traditional data transmission, bluetooth beacons have become more common as well. By adapting the mesh concept into Bluetooth, the flexibility of the mesh has been added to Bluetooth. The weak points of this technology, which are the relatively narrower coverage zone and not being able to send and receive data among multiple devices have been overcome with this adaptation. And it is also possible to cover larger physical areas with Bluetooth mesh. Even though there were studies that were aimed to perform mesh applications with Bluetooth before the release of the mesh standard, they were not more than applications that were conducted with experimental concerns. And they were not been standardized. Finally, the Special Interest Group has added the mesh to bluetooth as a standard and this drew the attention of the Bluetooth developers. In this study, a mesh network has been formed by using nRF52832 processors and the basic principles of the system was investigated. By using Bluetooth beacons which has different antenna structures and different Bluetooth standards, the range analysis has been performed and for a possible mesh network application the optimum number of low energy modules to be used were estimated.