Efficient policies for increasing capacity in Bluetooth: an indoor pico-cellular wireless system

In indoor pico-cellular wireless systems, such as Bluetooth, a pico-cell has a master-slave configuration. Bluetooth is a centralized master driven system that supports time division duplex medium access control. A pico-cell has a limit on the maximum number of active slaves. In Bluetooth, a pico-cell can have a maximum of seven slaves in active state (capable of transmitting and receiving data). The remaining slaves in a pico-cell remain in an inactive state. Having more than seven slaves connected to the master can be advantageous in many situations. Having a large number of slaves in one pico-cell as compared to forming new pico-cells can lead to lower power consumption and a relatively simple network architecture. We investigate different methods of increasing the capacity of Bluetooth pico-cells. We propose new policies using the park mode to increase the number slaves virtually connected to a master. These policies can have a significant impact on system parameters such as the throughput, packet delays and dropping probability of packets.