New Bluetooth Scatternet Formation for Scalable Spaced Dynamic Environment

Abstract

Bluetooth is a promising new wireless technology for short-range wireless communication. It is based on a frequency hopping physical layer and time division multiplexing technology. This fact implies that even nodes are within direct communication radio range of each other, only those nodes which are synchronized with each other can communicate. Bluetooth ad hoc networks are based on connecting several piconets into scatternet. The way by which scatternet is formed and the structure of scatternet will have a tremendous impact on the performance of the network. The issue of scatternet formation has been addressed by a number of papers in the technical literature. Most of those papers limit the Bluetooth ad hoc network range in 10 meters and are not appropriate for dynamic environment. In mobile environment, the behavior of mobile device can't be predicted; mobile device could join in and leave out the network arbitrarily. In this paper we present a scatternet formation protocol for dynamic environment and scaled space. The construction of scatternet requires no knowledge on the underlying physical topology and nodes can join in and leave out arbitrarily. If the physical topology is weakly connected, then the algorithm guarantees that the resulting topology will be connected. Our algorithm constructs scatternet into a tree structure that simplifies packet routing and scheduling. We also present simulation results that show our algorithm has low scatternet formation latency and also generates an efficient topology for forwarding packets.