TARP: a traffic-aware restructuring protocol for Bluetooth radio networks

Bluetooth is a well-known wireless technology designed for wireless personal area networks (WPAN). The Bluetooth device randomly searches and connects with other devices using the inquiry/inquiry scan and the page/page scan operations, resulting an uncontrolled scatternet topology. The unpredictable scatternet topology usually raises the problem of redundant traffic and causes inefficient communications. A traffic-aware restructuring protocol (TARP) is presented for partially restructuring a piconet or neighboring piconets by applying role switch mechanism. According to the recent routes and their traffic pattern, the TARP adjusts piconet structure by selecting the proper master from devices of a piconet and switches proper devices of neighboring piconets to reduce the route length and thus improve the power and bandwidth consumptions and transmission delay. Performance results show that TARP significantly improves network performance by reducing traffic load and power consumptions