An evolutionary Bluetooth scatternet formation protocol

Wireless technologies such as 802.11 do not impose topology constraints on the network; however, Bluetooth imposes certain constraints for constructing valid topologies. The performance of Bluetooth depends largely on these topologies. This paper presents and evaluates the performance of a new evolutionary scatternet topology construction protocol for Bluetooth networks. A scatternet can be viewed as a Bluetooth ad hoc network that is formed by interconnecting piconets. The scatternets formed have the following properties: 1) the scatternets are connected, i.e. every Bluetooth device can be reached from every other device; 2) piconet size is limited to eight nodes to avoid "parking" of slaves and the associated overhead; 3) the number of piconets is close to the universal lower bound that defines the optimal number of piconets, resulting in low interference amongst piconets; and 4) end-user delay is minimized during scatternet formation. This paper also reviews existing approaches to constructing scatternet topologies and suggests extensions to the proposed scatternet formation protocol.