{rfName}
Re

Indexed in

License and use

Citations

24

Altmetrics

Grant support

This work was supported by the Spanish Ministry of Science, Education and Universities, the European Regional Development Fund and the State Research Agency, Spain [grant number RTI2018-098156-B-C52] and by the University of Castilla-La Mancha, Spain with the European Regional Development Fund [grant number 2019-GRIN-27060] and also by the University of Castilla-La Mancha, Spain R&D plan with the European Social Fund. All authors approved the version of the manuscript to be published.

Analysis of institutional authors

Hortelano, DiegoCorresponding Author
Share
Publications
>
Article

Reducing the energy consumption of the friendship mechanism in Bluetooth mesh

Publicated to:Computer Networks. 195 108172- - 2021-05-25 195(), DOI: 10.1016/j.comnet.2021.108172

Authors: Hortelano, Diego; Olivares, Teresa; Ruiz, M Carmen

Affiliations

Univ Castilla La Mancha, Albacete Res Inst Informat, Albacete, Spain - Author
Univ Castilla La Mancha, Fac Comp Sci Engn, Albacete, Spain - Author

Abstract

This paper addresses new challenges arising from the emergence of Bluetooth mesh and its rapid adoption in Internet of Things (IoT) and Industrial IoT. One of the main problems associated with Bluetooth mesh is the power consumption of the mesh nodes, since the network needs to be scanned constantly to receive and relay messages. In order to reduce the energy consumption in the nodes where possible, the friendship mechanism is provided as a solution by the Bluetooth mesh specification. The friendship mechanism enables Low Power Nodes (LPNs) to spend most of their lifetime in sleep mode without losing the messages addressed to them. For this purpose, a node that is constantly in scan mode, called friend node (FN), stores these messages, sending them on request. This mechanism works with a stop-and-wait protocol, resulting in inefficient channel utilisation. However, to the best of our knowledge, there are no proposals for the improvement of this mechanism, likely due to its novelty. This paper studies different approaches for the improvement of the friendship mechanism: improving the Bearer Layer, improving time synchronisation and improving advertising channel utilisation. The results of this study reveal that each of the proposals presents a limitation that makes its final implementation unfeasible, and thus the challenge arises of developing a proposal for its optimisation. Accordingly, this work presents a proposal to improve the friendship mechanism with Burst Transmissions and Listen Before Transmit (BTLBT), which has been evaluated and validated in real hardware platforms. The results obtained for 4 LPNs show a reduction in the time required to receive the FN messages, as well as a 66.65% reduction in the time required to scan for each message. Finally, a consumption study is presented, where the results show that our proposal achieves a 19.81% improvement in lifetime compared to the standard friendship mechanism.

Keywords
Bluetooth meshFriend nodesFriendshipImprovementLow power nodes

Quality index

Bibliometric impact. Analysis of the contribution and dissemination channel

The work has been published in the journal Computer Networks due to its progression and the good impact it has achieved in recent years, according to the agency WoS (JCR), it has become a reference in its field. In the year of publication of the work, 2021, it was in position 9/54, thus managing to position itself as a Q1 (Primer Cuartil), in the category Computer Science, Hardware & Architecture.

From a relative perspective, and based on the normalized impact indicator calculated from the Field Citation Ratio (FCR) of the Dimensions source, it yields a value of: 3.72, which indicates that, compared to works in the same discipline and in the same year of publication, it ranks as a work cited above average. (source consulted: Dimensions May 2025)

Specifically, and according to different indexing agencies, this work has accumulated citations as of 2025-05-15, the following number of citations:

  • WoS: 10
  • Scopus: 14
  • OpenCitations: 13
Impact and social visibility

From the perspective of influence or social adoption, and based on metrics associated with mentions and interactions provided by agencies specializing in calculating the so-called "Alternative or Social Metrics," we can highlight as of 2025-05-15:

  • The use of this contribution in bookmarks, code forks, additions to favorite lists for recurrent reading, as well as general views, indicates that someone is using the publication as a basis for their current work. This may be a notable indicator of future more formal and academic citations. This claim is supported by the result of the "Capture" indicator, which yields a total of: 18 (PlumX).
Leadership analysis of institutional authors

There is a significant leadership presence as some of the institution’s authors appear as the first or last signer, detailed as follows: First Author (Hortelano Haro, Diego) .

the author responsible for correspondence tasks has been Hortelano Haro, Diego.