Round robin with look ahead: a new scheduling algorithm for Bluetooth

Abstract

We propose two new media access control (MAC) scheduling algorithms for Bluetooth whose objective is to achieve high channel utilization (throughput). Conventional scheduling policies such as round robin (RR) in the Bluetooth environment results in wastage of slots and hence poor utilization of the network resources. As Bluetooth devices are designed to carry both voice and data, scheduling becomes a complex task as slots are reserved for voice traffic at periodic intervals and the data packets are allowed to have variable size. We view the MAC scheduling problem in Bluetooth as an online bin packing problem. The two scheduling policies being proposed in the paper, look ahead (LA) and look ahead round robin (LARR), can be viewed as online bin packing with lookahead. We first analytically demonstrate that an optimal scheduling policy can have about 66% improvement in throughput over the round robin policy. Our extensive simulation shows that both LA and LARR achieves nearly 10% improvement in throughput over RR. As the computational complexity of LARR is lower than that of LA and also LARR avoids the possibility of starvation, we suggest the use of this algorithm over RR.