A Bluetooth telephony model through multi-hop routing

Bluetooth (BT) is a new short-range (10 m) wireless personal area network (WPAN) technology, operating in the globally unlicensed 2.4 GHz ISM band. At present, BT´s scope appears limited to direct, single hop communication and cable replacement. However, it seems destined to grow into applications that would require indirect communication (multi-hop) support such as large conferences and even BT telephony. The author feels that the primary hurdle BT needs to defeat is the lack of support for multi-hop routing of data/voice packets in BT networks. While most contemporary research on BT has focused on BT usage scenarios profiled at the launch of the technology, the author feels that the standard has the potential to grow into areas such as Bluetooth telephony, where BT enabled phone sets would be able to allow users to communicate over large distances, with no charge. Thus, the need for efficient packet routing is born. The algorithm presented intends to offer a low cost, backward compatible solution by building on top of existing BT functionality (while leaving it intact), and distributing the burden of determining and maintaining routes (through the BT scatternet) and routing vectors between the various BT entities in the BT scatternet.