Throughput, energy and path length tradeoffs in Bluetooth scatternets

In this work, we determine an analytical relationship between the average path length of traffic connections of a Bluetooth scatternet and the overall throughput and power consumption of the network. Results obtained implementing this analytical relationship to different scatternet topologies are presented and discussed. By reducing the hop count in a scatternet we can achieve better performance in terms of throughput and power consumption. Therefore, the issue of minimizing the hop count in the presence of mobility, changing traffic flows and varying interference receives an important role. In our analysis we also show the impact of the link quality on the overall throughput. The obtained results motivate the importance of heuristics aimed at reducing the communication path length in a scatternet.