An empirical study on the performance of bluetooth scatternets

Bluetooth scatternet technology was conceived to provide support for ad hoc multihop networking applications. Many theoretical works in the literature have been dedicated to optimize the formation and operation of Bluetooth scatternets. However, the performance of a real scatternet strongly relies on the implementation of the Bluetooth stack in the interfaces of the network nodes. By analyzing the behavior of a simple scatternet of three nodes, this paper shows evidence of the scalability and delay problems that can appear when scatternets are deployed on existing hardware interfaces.