An Adaptive Traffic-Aware Polling and Scheduling Algorithm for Bluetooth Piconets

Abstract

According to Bluetooth specifications, communications between slave devices within a piconet are controlled by its master node. In other words, a master node has to be involved in all packet exchange activities in its associated piconet. Consequently, how to determine the polling sequence and how to estimate service time for individual slave nodes are two critical intrapiconet missions to a master and are usually categorized as the intrapiconet polling and scheduling problem. Obviously, a good polling sequence can reduce the average packet delay, whereas accurate service time estimation would result in better throughput performance. Furthermore, the packet delay of intrapiconet transmission is mostly caused by the inadequate behavior in which the master node polls an idle slave since other nonidle slaves belonging to the same piconet have to wait for the completion of such POLL/NULL packet transmissions. Certainly, unnecessary pollings would cause bandwidth utilization reduction as well. Therefore, the adaptability to traffic pattern is a necessary condition to a good intrapiconet polling and scheduling algorithm. In this paper, we proposed a traffic-aware algorithm to deal with the polling and scheduling issue within a piconet. The objective of our work is to maximize the throughput performance and to reduce the average intrapiconet packet delay as simultaneously as possible. As expected, the simulation results verify that our work designs an intrapiconet scheduling scheme with low delay and high throughput, which is adaptive to various traffic scenarios as well.