Resource management schemes for Bluetooth scatternets

When several Bluetooth networks interconnect through a number of bridge nodes, they form a scatternet. However, no routing protocol has yet been defined for Bluetooth scatternets. Meanwhile, because of its small size and low cost, Bluetooth is widely "pervasive", in the sense that even low cost electrical appliances will be expected to become Bluetooth enabled. If so, scatternets consisting of several piconets will exist even in a home environment. Thus, there is a pressing need to develop an efficient ad hoc routing algorithm to make effective communication possible between distant devices. This study proposes an integrated ad hoc routing and time-slot scheduling (IARTSS) scheme to address the problem of ad hoc routing in Bluetooth networks. Our proposed scheme contains four main mechanisms to address the different facets of the problem, namely compensation-based time-slot assignment (CTSA), traffic differentiation queuing (TDQ), adaptive master-slave switching (AMSS), and an enhanced AODV algorithm for ad hoc routing. We have built a comprehensive Bluetooth simulator and performed extensive simulations to evaluate the proposed IARTSS. We find that our proposed scheme can perform well under a wide variety of practical circumstances, and provides efficient and high performance intra-piconet and inter-piconet communications.