Efficient polling schemes for Bluetooth picocells

Bluetooth is a new low-cost wireless technology that is going to play an important role in communications among small electronic devices and the access to wired networking infrastructure. Bluetooth stations that communicate directly form a piconet. In a piconet one station has the role of master and the others are slaves. The access to the medium is based on a TDD (time division duplexing) scheme controlled by the master. The master sends packets to slaves in even-numbered slots triggering a transmission from slaves in the subsequent slot. Slaves are allowed to send packets only in response to a master packet. The way in which the master schedules packets transmission to slaves or polls them determines system performance. We consider the problem of designing an efficient and simple polling and scheduling scheme for Bluetooth. We propose some practical schemes and compare their performance with some ideal schemes derived from known results for polling systems