Round-robin with FCFS preemption: a simple MAC scheduling scheme for Bluetooth piconet

Bluetooth is a short-range TDD (time division duplex) wireless network that supports both circuit- and packet-oriented applications. A piconet is composed of a device configured as master and at most seven other devices acting as slaves. At medium access control (MAC) layer, the master can select a slave to send a data packet and until then, the slave is not allowed to transmit. Round-robin (RR) and exhaustive round-robin (ERR) are two elementary MAC scheduling schemes that are both simple and efficient. This paper proposes RR-FCFS, a simple MAC scheduling scheme that has the same advantages as RR and ERR. RR-FCFS acts as RR if the master's queue is empty and starts transmitting packets in first-come-first-serve order otherwise. The simulation results show that RR-FCFS's performance in terms of packet delay and queue length is comparable with those of RR and ERR.