English

Dual-Radio BLE-LoRa Hierarchical Mesh for Infrastructure-Free Emergency Communication

Systems and Control 2026-04-20 v1 Systems and Control

Abstract

We present a dual-radio hierarchical mesh architecture for infrastructure-free emergency communication that exploits the complementary strengths of Bluetooth Low Energy (BLE) and LoRa. Nodes equipped with both an nRF52840 (BLE 5.0 Coded PHY) and an SX1262 (LoRa sub-GHz) form local clusters via BLE advertising-based AODV routing, while dynamically elected cluster heads bridge inter-cluster traffic over a LoRa backbone. We derive a formal traffic offloading model showing that with locality bias beta >= 0.76, validated against search-and-rescue communication patterns, the architecture keeps 82-90% of traffic on BLE, reducing LoRa energy consumption by 79% compared to LoRa-only mesh. Analytical evaluation demonstrates 10 km+ network diameter, 250-562 node scalability, and sub-50 ms intra-cluster latency on a 3.0 KB RAM footprint. To our knowledge, this is the first architecture combining BLE advertising-based mesh routing with a multi-hop LoRa backbone on commodity hardware.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2604.15532,
  title  = {Dual-Radio BLE-LoRa Hierarchical Mesh for Infrastructure-Free Emergency Communication},
  author = {Andrii Vakhnovskyi},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2604.15532},
  year   = {2026}
}

Comments

4 pages, 1 figure, 3 tables, 17 references