Distributed construction and maintenance of bandwidth-efficient bluetooth scatternets

Abstract

Bluetooth is currently the mainstream technology used for short range wireless communication due to its low power and low cost properties. In order to communicate, Bluetooth enabled devices can form networks called piconets, which consist of at most eight members. To construct larger Bluetooth networks, which are called scatternets, any number of piconets can be combined. Although piconet construction process is standardized by Bluetooth Special Interest Group, scatternet construction policies and algorithms are not yet clarified. There have been many solution proposals for the scatternet construction problem each of which focuses on different aspects of it like the efficiency of the construction algorithm, ease of routing in the resulting scatternet and number of piconets that constitute it. Although various considerations came into picture, bandwidth efficiency of the resulting scatternet topology, which depends on the placement of nodes and communication demand among them, did not take much attention. In this thesis, we provide a distributed and adaptive algorithm that constructs a scatternet and based on collected traffic flow information, modifies it to minimize the overall bandwidth usage. As consequences of efficient use of available bandwidth, reduce in average latency and total energy consumption as well as increase in available bandwidth for new communication demand are also aimed. Moreover, performance of the proposed algorithm is presented, based on the evaluation criteria described.