Differentiated Priority Scheduling and Adaptive Segmentation for Bluetooth Piconets

Bluetooth is a wireless communication technology, aimed at supporting connectivity among close proximity mobile devices. Bluetooth enables the design of low-power, low-cost, and small-size radios. Bluetooth’s MAC is a polling based protocol, where a central Bluetooth unit (master) determines channel access to all other nodes (slaves) in the network (piconet). One of the open research problems in Bluetooth is the design of efficient scheduling protocols. This paper proposes a polling policy that aims to achieve increased system throughput and reduced packet delays while providing reasonable fairness among all traffic flows, even in the presence of asymmetric traffic rates and unpredictable channel error conditions. Simulation results confirm that our proposed policy achieves higher throughput, lower packet delays with reasonable fairness among all the connections, compared to previous work in the literature.