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.

This paper proposes an architecture for Wireless Sensor and Actuator Networks (WSAN) using the new standard Bluetooth Low Energy (BLE). This architecture can be used as reference for the deployment of real and flexible monitoring platforms based on Internet of Things (IoT) scenarios such as smart homes, making a multitude of tasks easier to the user. A general overview of the architecture is presented as well as a specific description of its different layers.

This paper shows the evaluation results with the new mesh topology for the Bluetooth Low Energy standard in IoT scenarios where users send values from different monitorization parameters. In this experimentation we have discovered as the user collaboration can increase the benefits of this topology. It is possible to expand the coverage area without adding new BLE nodes making use of the smart devices of users.

Summary Network rOle‐based Routing Intelligent Algorithm is a novel routing algorithm for wireless sensor networks, which combine various effective techniques in order to reduce energy consumption and improve data routes. This algorithm uses role assignment for distributing tasks over the network nodes and fuzzy logic for making decisions. There is a clear need for the use of formal methods to validate the correctness of the protocols as well as performance and functionality prior to the deployment of such algorithms in a real environment. This paper presents a formal and rigorous study of Network rOle‐based Routing Intelligent Algorithm. Prioritised‐timed coloured petri nets (PTCPNs) have been chosen as an appropriate modelling language. In this way, PTCPNs have been used to describe complete and unambiguous specifications of system behaviour, whereas CPNTools is used to evaluate the correctness of the protocol using state space exploration and for performance evaluation using simulation. Copyright © 2015 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.