Pitfalls and tradeoffs on dealing with handoff management in bluetooth-based WPANs for real-time applications

In this work, the problems and respective solutions for dealing with two of the most basic questions regarding handoff management are presented: to avoid total loss of connectivity; and to reduce overall time of the handoff procedure. The focus of this research is on handoff in WPANs for real-time applications. Therefore, Bluetooth stands out as the ideal technology for case study due to its particular alignment with the behavior and requirements of the WPAN’s network model. Bluetooth’s inquiry and paging operations may be calibrated for achieving fast discoveries and connections while scatternets may be used to avoid total loss of connectivity. However, the usage of scatternets and calibration of inquiry and paging unveil a series of challenging aspects when applied along with real-time applications. Such challenges are the priority of inquiry and paging data traffic over users’ applications and unpredictability of scatternet behavior. The key point to overwhelm these difficulties is to understand how they affect the real-time data transfers. In this article a set of discussions and experiments that demonstrate how inquiries, pagings and scatternets can aid achieving the goals of fast and uninterrupted handoffs, as well as the tenuous traps and tradeoffs behind such operations and configurations over real-time applications performance are presented.