Distributed construction and maintenance of bandwidth and energy efficient bluetooth scatternets

Abstract

Bluetooth networks can be constructed as piconets or scatternets depending on the number of nodes in the network. Although piconet construction is a well-defined process specified in Bluetooth standards, scatternet formation policies and algorithms are not well specified. Among many solution proposals for this problem, only a few of them focus on efficient usage of bandwidth in the resulting scatternets. In this paper, we propose a distributed algorithm for the scatternet formation problem that dynamically constructs and maintains a scatternet based on estimated traffic flow rates between nodes. The algorithm is adaptive to changes and maintains a constructed scatternet for bandwidth-efficiency when nodes come and go or when traffic flow rates change. Based on simulations, the paper also presents the improvements in bandwidth-efficiency and reduction in energy consumption provided by the proposed algorithm.