Short range radio based ad-hoc networking: performance and properties

The current research and development of short range radio technologies will provide new means to implement ad-hoc networking between cellular phones, notebook computers, and small, low powered devices such as electronic calendars. An industry consortium has recently released preliminary specifications for a short range radio technology named Bluetooth. The Bluetooth radio operates in the unlicensed ISM band at 2.4 GHz with a transmission power in the range of -30-20 dBm. The Bluetooth radio nodes form ad-hoc networks called piconets, each of which offers a gross bit rate of 1 Mbps and allows a mix of voice and data communication channels. This study presents a number of different network usage cases for Bluetooth ad-hoc piconets and a subset of these scenarios is further analysed by means of simulations. A mix of data traffic and voice traffic is used in the simulations, where the data traffic streams are modelled with IBP processes. A worst case laptop conference scenario is simulated to stress the robustness of the Bluetooth system under very high load and bursty traffic conditions. Moreover, simulations are also made with measured voice traffic to study a mixture of bursty data and voice packet traffic.