Bluetooth Low Energy (BLE) Mesh is widely recognized as a driver technology for IoT applications. However, the lack of quality of service (QoS) in BLE Mesh, represented by packet prioritization, significantly limits its potential. This work implements a quality-of-service (QoS) method for BLE Mesh to prioritize the data packets and provide them with different network transmission settings according to their assigned priority. Unlike existing works on QoS for BLE Mesh, our proposed approach does not require any modifications to the BLE Mesh protocol and can be smoothly adopted in existing BLE Mesh networks. We conducted an extensive measurement campaign to evaluate our solution over a 15-node BLE Mesh network deployed to emulate a smart healthcare scenario where 45 sensors with an assigned priority transmit information over the network. The experiments provide performance results for single and multi channel network scenarios. The obtained results validate our solution, showing the difference between the established priorities and providing insights and guidelines to conduct further research on QoS over BLE Mesh and broadcast-based networks.

翻译：摘要：低功耗蓝牙（BLE）Mesh被广泛认为是物联网应用的关键驱动技术。然而，以数据包优先级化机制为代表的服务质量（QoS）缺失，显著限制了其潜力。本文为BLE Mesh实现了一种服务质量方法，通过为数据包分配优先级，并根据优先级为其提供差异化的网络传输配置。与现有BLE Mesh QoS研究不同，本方案无需对BLE Mesh协议进行任何修改，可平滑部署于现有BLE Mesh网络。我们开展大规模测量实验，在部署于智能医疗场景的15节点BLE Mesh网络上评估方案——该场景中45个具有预设优先级的传感器通过网格传输信息。实验针对单信道和多信道网络场景提供了性能评估结果。实验结果验证了方案的有效性，不仅揭示了优先级间的差异化表现，还为在BLE Mesh及广播型网络中开展QoS相关研究提供了见解与指导方针。