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

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.