Efficient multi-hop communications in Bluetooth scatternets

This study proposes an integrated ad hoc routing and time-slot scheduling (IARTSS) scheme to address the problem of ad hoc routing in Bluetooth networks. Our proposed scheme contains four main mechanisms to address the different facets of the problem, namely compensation- based time-slot assignment (CTSA), traffic differentiation queueing (TDQ), adaptive master-slave switching (AMSS), and an enhanced AODV algorithm for ad hoc routing. CTSA judiciously allocates time slots to slaves based on elapsed time, utilization, and queue lengths, helping the bridge nodes to catch up with the lagging of services in piconets. TDQ differentiates traffic into self-originated and forwarded messages, and serves them in a dynamically adjusted adaptive ratio. AMSS calculates the time for a bridge node to stay in a piconet in a more effective way, based on utilization fraction and queue lengths. Enhanced AODV for ad hoc routing is implemented as a routing protocol for Bluetooth scatternet. We have built a comprehensive Bluetooth simulator and performed extensive simulations to evaluate the proposed IARTSS. We find that our proposed scheme can perform well under a wide variety of practical circumstances, and provides efficient and high performance intra-piconet and inter-piconet communications.