Performance evaluation of a new scatternet formation protocol for multi-hop Bluetooth networks

We evaluate the performance of a new protocol for scatternet formation in Bluetooth multihop networks. The protocol implements the three fundamental steps to scatternet. formation, namely, device discovery, piconet formation and piconet interconnection. A Bluetooth extension to ns2, the VINT project simulator, has been developed to address all the details pertinent to scatternet formation.. The performance evaluation allows us to assess the impact of the device discovery duration over the scatternet formation process, to evaluate the time for the protocol to generate a connected scatternet, and to investigate metrics that pertain to the "quality" of the scatternet, such as the average number of piconets, the average number of slaves per piconets, the average number of roles assumed by each node and the average length of the routes between any two Bluetooth devices.