DMX-communication over Bluetooth low energy mesh network

Sammanfattning: With the addition of mesh capability to Bluetooth low energy(BLE) in 2017 new possibilities open up for the Internet of Things applications of Bluetooth. With the rapidly increasing number of connected devices a few new standards are competing for being the standard protocol for low power mesh communication. BLE is mostly aimed towards low bandwidth data such as sensor readings or light control. However, this thesis attempts to investigate the viability of adapting BLE mesh nodes to communicate DMX-data which is a protocol widely used in lightning and stage effects. The system is implemented on Bluetooth development kits and the latency and power consumption are measured. The results show that the latency is significant and with high variance if the full DMX frame is transmitted, rendering the application non-applicable on many real-time applications. It can however be justified in some applications due to Bluetooth's well established eco-system of devices and functionality where the nodes could extend their capabilities by implementing already established BLE models. By only transmitting the updated channels the latency can be lowered to values that would in some applications be indistinguishable from wired connection. The energy consumption of BLE mesh suffers greatly with the addition of mesh due to its constant scanning but by implementing low power nodes which keep the radio off during certain intervals this consumption could be greatly decreased. The results also show a high variance of latency depending on the node configuration regarding to the placements and the number of hops required to reach the intended recipient.