Bluetooth PAN profile: dynamic master configuration

When more than 2 nodes communicate in a Bluetooth piconet using the PAN profile, the choice of the node that acts as the master determines the efficiency of the bandwidth utilisation. Several ways to improve this efficiency exist and in this paper we investigate the performance of one of these methods: dynamic master configuration. This method dynamically changes the device that acts as a master according to the network traffic to optimise the performance of the Bluetooth network. The dynamic master configuration algorithm is implemented in the WING-IP simulator and the performance is analysed for various traffic distributions. Depending on the network traffic, dynamic master configuration can provide a modest to significant performance improvement in piconet capacity and average packet delay.