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An Experimental Study on BLE 5 Mesh Applied to Public Transportation

Published: 13 April 2024 Publication History

Abstract

Today, In-Vehicle Wireless Sensor Networks (IVWSNs) are being used by car manufacturers because it saves time in the assembling process; saves costs in the harness and after-sales; and makes vehicles lighter, which helps lessen fuel consumption. There is no definition for wireless solution technology for IVWSNs, because each one has its own characteristics, and probably this is one of the reasons for its smooth usage in the automotive industry. A gap identified in wireless sensor networks for the automotive domain is that the related literature focuses only on ordinary cars with a star topology and few of them with mesh topology. This article aims to cover this gap by presenting an experimental study performed on verifying the new Bluetooth 5 technology working in a mesh topology applied to public transportation systems (buses). To perform this evaluation, a setup to emulate an IVWSN was deployed in a working city bus. Measuring the network metrics, the bus was placed in a variety of conditions during its trajectory to determine the influence of the passengers and the whole environment on the data transmission. The results suggest that Bluetooth 5 in a mesh topology is a promising candidate for IVWSNs because it shows the robustness of losing only 0.16% packets in the worst test, as well as its ability to cover a wider range compared to its previous version, indeed a better RSSI and jitter, with lower transmission power, compared to a star topology. The round trip time results can support the analysis for time-critical applications.

Supplementary Material

tosn-2022-0241-File002 (tosn-2022-0241-file002.zip)
Supplementary material

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        Published In

        cover image ACM Transactions on Sensor Networks
        ACM Transactions on Sensor Networks  Volume 20, Issue 3
        May 2024
        634 pages
        EISSN:1550-4867
        DOI:10.1145/3613571
        • Editor:
        • Wen Hu
        Issue’s Table of Contents

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        Association for Computing Machinery

        New York, NY, United States

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        Publication History

        Published: 13 April 2024
        Online AM: 12 February 2024
        Accepted: 22 January 2024
        Revised: 31 December 2023
        Received: 11 September 2022
        Published in TOSN Volume 20, Issue 3

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        Author Tags

        1. Wireless sensor network
        2. public transportation
        3. Bluetooth 5
        4. mesh communication
        5. automotive communication
        6. vehicular network

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