PAMP: a power-aware multicast protocol for Bluetooth radio systems

Bluetooth is a low power, low cost, and short-range wireless technology. A piconet consists of a master and up to seven slaves. Devices that desire to receive data from the same source construct a multicast group, sharing multicast communication services. A piconet may consist of member and non-member devices of a multicast group, causing non-member devices to consume power to overhear the multicast message. For those members that belong to different piconets, a multi-hop communication path is required, hence increasing the delay time of a multicast service and causing more non-member devices to participate in the multicast tree. The paper develops a power-aware multicast protocol (PAMP) for constructing an efficient multicast tree. By collecting members into the same piconet, the constructed multicast tree has characteristics of fewest non-member devices, smallest tree level, and proper role assignments to members. Experimental results show that PAMP provides an efficient multicast service with low power consumption and small delay.