An evolutionary Bluetooth scatternet formation protocol

Wireless technologies such as 802.11 do not impose topology constraints on the network; however, Bluetooth imposes certain constraints for constructing valid topologies. The performance of Bluetooth depends largely on these topologies. This paper presents and evaluates the performance of a new evolutionary scatternet topology construction protocol for Bluetooth networks. A scatternet can be viewed as a Bluetooth ad hoc network that is formed by interconnecting piconets. The scatternets formed have the following properties: 1) the scatternets are connected, i.e. every Bluetooth device can be reached from every other device, 2) piconet size is limited to eight nodes to avoid "parking" of slaves and the associated overhead, 3) the number of piconets is close to the universal lower bound that defines the optimal number of piconets, resulting in low interference amongst piconets, and 4) end-user delay is minimized during scatternet formation. This paper also reviews existing approaches to constructing scatternet topologies and suggests extensions to the proposed scatternet formation protocol.