BTnet - a new topology establishment scheme for Bluetooth scatternets

The recently established Bluetooth standard so far does not provide clear specifications for establishing scatternet topology, hence leading to the necessity of proprietary scatternet protocols according to application-specific requirements. The number of possible topologies for a scatternet formed with a set of N nodes is numerous. It is therefore not feasible to perform a search over the entire space for an optimum topology. We present BTnet, a new scatternet protocol for a specific class of medium scale indoor ad-hoc networks. The performance of the topologies that meet a defined set of requirements has been evaluated. Issues like discovery of a large number of nodes, establishment of the network using the computed topology, and routing data in a scatternet have been addressed as essential aspects of using Bluetooth for medium to large-scale multi-hop networks.