Interference-aware MAC scheduling and SAR policies for Bluetooth scatternets

Bluetooth utilizes fast frequency hopping to mitigate interference from other wireless devices and other Bluetooth piconets that share the same frequency range. However, it still can not avoid the interference between piconets entirely. In our simulation, we observed that the inter-piconet interference can significantly degrade the system throughput by more than 30%. The system throughput within a piconet can be improved by a proper arrangement of the segmentation/reassembling (SAR) policy and a good selection of MAC scheduling protocols. Many SAR policies and MAC scheduling protocols were proposed, but none of them takes the inter-piconet interference into consideration. In this paper, we study the impact of the interference on the performance of TCP traffic over a Bluetooth scatternet with multiple overlapping piconets. To alleviate the impact, we propose interference-aware SAR policies as well as the interference-aware MAC scheduling protocols. The simulation results show that our schemes help reduce the impact of the inter-piconet interference by more than 50%.