Distributed Construction and Maintenance of Bandwidth and Energy Efficient Bluetooth Scatternets

Abstract

Bluetooth networks can be constructed as piconets or scatternets depending on the number of nodes in the network. Although piconet construction is a well-defined process specified in Bluetooth standards, scatternet formation policies and algorithms are not well specified. Among many solution proposals for this problem, only a few of them focus on efficient usage of bandwidth in the resulting scatternets. In this paper, we propose a distributed algorithm for the scatternet formation problem that dynamically constructs and maintains a scatternet based on estimated traffic flow rates between nodes. The algorithm is adaptive to changes and maintains a constructed scatternet for bandwidth-efficiency when nodes come and go or when traffic flow rates change. Based on simulations, the paper also presents the improvements in bandwidth-efficiency and reduction in energy consumption provided by the proposed algorithm.

An efficient reconstruction approach for improving Bluetree scatternet formation in personal area networks

“…Similar issues have been discussed in Tekkalmaz et al (2006) and Chang and Chang (2007). In the approach of Tekkalmaz et al (2006), several techniques are used to achieve reduction in traffic load: node transfer, piconet merge, role reassignment, and piconet division. Node transfer and piconet merge are used to put nodes with high traffic between them in the same piconet.…”

“…In studies of scatternet formation, the literature has primarily focused on Bluemesh scatternet formation (Tekkalmaz et al, 2006;Chang and Chang, 2007;Cuomo et al, 2004;Chiasserini and Marsan, 2005;Petrioli et al, 2004;Sunkavai and Rarnalmurthy, 2004;Li et al, 2004;Salonidis et al, 2005;Shih et al, 2003;Zhang Xin and Riley, 2005). Bluering scatternets have also been discussed in Lin et al (2003), as have been Bluestar (Petrioli et al, 2003;Quigley et al, 2004) and Bluetree (Zaruba et al, 2001;Tan et al, 2002;Cuomo et al, 2003).…”

“…The role assignment then re-selects appropriate nodes to act as the master or bridge. Due to the need to calculate all possible selection cases, the approach of Tekkalmaz et al (2006) results in complex computations in role assignment. While piconet division can improve total bandwidth usage in a scatternet by splitting a piconet into two piconets, the average route length may be increased.…”

Congestion control of bluetooth radio system by piconet restructuring

“…When two slaves in a piconet are going to communication, they should first transmit packets to master in odd number of slots and master forward these packets to destination slave in even number of slots. In previous works (Whitaker et al, 2005;Tekkalmaz et al, 2006;Chiasserini et al, 2003), role change operations are used to change roles of devices in a piconet according to the amount of intra-piconet traffic flow. However, the traffic flows of inter-piconet communication are not taking into consideration, so the throughput of entire scatternet is not optimized.…”

“…In this paper, a piconet restructuring mechanism based on role-switching technique (Bluetooth Special Interests Group; Whitaker et al, 2005;Tekkalmaz et al, 2006;Chiasserini et al, 2003) is proposed. The number of piconets and the role of devices can be determined automatically based on local traffic flow and relations between devices.…”