Relay reduction and disjoint routes construction for scatternet over Bluetooth radio system

Abstract

Bluetooth is a new technology for low-cost, low-power, and short-range wireless communication. By constructing a piconet, Bluetooth device establishes link and communicates with other device in a master–slave manner. Relay is a Bluetooth device that joins two or more piconets and forwards data from one piconet to another, providing multi-hop (or inter-piconet) communication services. In a Bluetooth scatternet, the number of relays and the degree of each relay are factors that significantly affect the performance of entire network. Unnecessary relays raise the difficulty of scheduling, leading to frequent packet loss. Relay switching among several piconets in turns also creates guard time overhead and increases the transmission delay. This study presents an effective protocol that can dynamically adjust the network topology by reducing the unnecessary relays. An efficient scatternet environment thus can be constructed with characteristics of connected, high bandwidth utilization and low maintenance cost. Additionally, a routing protocol is developed to reduce the path length and generate two disjoint routes for any pair of source and destination devices located in different piconets. Experimental results demonstrate that the proposed protocols perform well in terms of route length, bandwidth consumption, and transmission delay.