Low Energy Bluetooth Inter-Node Communication Schemes via Randomized Reconfiguration

Low Energy Bluetooth (LowE-BT) communication is becoming more ubiquitous as the number of wireless connectable devices increase. It is also emerging as a communication methodology supporting low energy wireless communication in renewable distributed energy systems. A typical LowE-BT configuration incorporates one fixed configuration client (master) device and one or more fixed configuration server (slave) device(s). For multiple devices in an Ad-hoc network having inter-communication needs where the physical separation cannot accommodate a centralized scheme, a robust and reconfigurable communication topology is desired. In particular, we consider a case where the physical devices are equally spaced along a line (or string) with sufficient distance to necessitate node-to-node communication only. We propose and compare two schemes. The first is an asynchronous scheme in which randomized client/server reconfiguration occurs within a prescribed interval allowing simultaneous message packet transfers along the entire network to occur. The second is a synchronous scheme in which the client/server reconfiguration and packet transfers occur sequentially along the network. Given the data packets from all nodes can be combined to form a block packet transferred from one end of the string to the other, the mean time for network block packet transfers are computed and compared for these two schemes to determine which method minimizes block packet transmission time.