An efficient and QoS-aware scheduling policy for Bluetooth

We propose an efficient and QoS (quality of service)-aware MAC (medium access control) scheduling algorithm for Bluetooth, which considers both throughput and delay performance on each master-slave pair in scheduling decisions, and thus, attempts to maximize overall performance. Since Bluetooth is basically operated with the round-robin scheduling policy, many slots may be wasted due to poll or null packets when there is no data waiting for transmission in queues. To overcome this link wastage problem, several algorithms have been proposed. Among them, queue state-based priority policy and low power mode-based algorithm can perform with high throughput and reasonable fairness. However, their performances may depend on traffic characteristics, and they require additional computational and signaling overheads. We propose a simple priority based scheduling algorithm providing service differentiation as well as high throughput and fairness. The performance of our proposed algorithm is evaluated with respect to throughput and fairness. Simulation results show that overall performance can be improved by selecting suitable parameters. Our results can serve as a guideline to the design of QoS-aware MAC scheduling policy in Bluetooth.