A priority-based MAC scheduling algorithm for enhancing QoS support in Bluetooth piconet

Bluetooth is a personal wireless communication technology and is being applied in many scenarios. Current existing MAC (medium access control) scheduling schemes only provide best-effort service for all master-slave connections. It is very challenging to provide QoS (quality of service) support for different connections due to the feature of master driven TDD (time division duplex). This paper addresses the issue of how to enhance QoS support in a Bluetooth piconet. We propose a MAC scheduling algorithm which can provide different QoS for different connections based on priorities. Considering the feature of master driven TDD, we define token counters to estimate the traffic of real-time slaves. To increase bandwidth utilization, a backoff mechanism is then presented for best-effort slaves to decrease the frequency of polling idle slaves. Simulation results demonstrate that our scheme achieves better performance than existing schemes.