Policies for increasing throughput and decreasing power consumption in Bluetooth MAC

Bluetooth is a fast emerging standard for indoor picocellular wireless networks. Power is at a premium in typical Bluetooth devices like palmtops, PDAs, laptops and mobile phones. The Bluetooth standard defines various modes for reducing power consumption of the devices by reducing their transmission and reception activities. System throughput can be increased by keeping Bluetooth devices in low power mode in case of low data rates at those devices, by avoiding unnecessary polling packets. In this paper, we propose policies for scheduling and switching of power modes of Bluetooth devices for increasing throughput and decreasing power consumption. All the proposed schemes, along with a policy where all the devices are always in active mode and a policy with previous information of packet arrival times, are implemented on a Bluetooth simulator for comparing their performance. Performance of the policies is compared for different traffic models and actual traffic traces. The policies are found to perform well in terms of power savings and throughput enhancement.