Constructing Long-Lived Scatternets in Bluetooth Networks

Bluetooth is a new low cost and short-range radio technology. Mobile devices equipped with bluetooth chipset use FH (Frequency Hopping) method in a frequency band of 2.4 GHz to construct a piconet with other chipsets. Different piconets can communicate through relay devices. To date, many researchers have proposed different scatternet formation protocols. However, most of them consider how to quickly construct a scatternet with minimal piconets or how to maintain the desired topology. In the paper, we propose a new scatternet formation protocol for Bluetooth networks. We aim to construct a scatternet with longer life time. Moreover, our protocol can maintain the desired scatternet formation even when the topology of the network changes. Simulation results show that our protocol outperforms BTCP Bluetooth Topology Construction Protocol (BTCP) and Randomized Distributed Scatternet Formation (RDSF) algorithm in many respects including network life time, scatternet construction time, and connection ratio.