Formation, Routing, and Maintenance Protocols for the BlueRing Scatternet of Bluetooths

• Authors: Ting-Yu Lin;Yu-Chee Tseng;Keng-Ming Chang;Chun-Liang Tu
• Venue: HICSS '03 Proceedings of the 36th Annual Hawaii International Conference on System Sciences (HICSS'03) - Track 9 - Volume 9
• Year: 2003

The basic networking unit in Bluetooth is piconet, and alarger-area Bluetooth network can be formed by multiplepiconets, called scatternet. However, the structure of scatternets is not defined in the Bluetooth specification and remains as an open issue at the designers 'choice. It isdesirable to have simple yet efficient scatternet topologieswith well supports of outing protocols, considering thatBluetooths are to be used for personal-area networks withdesign goals of simplicity and compactness. In the literature, although many routing protocols have been proposedfo mobile ad hoc networks, directly applying them posesa problem due to Bluetooth's special baseband and MAC-laye features. In this work, we propose an attractive scatternet topology called BlueRing which connects piconets asa ring interleaved by bridges between piconets, and addressits formation, outing, and topology maintenance protocols. The BlueRing architecture enjoys the following nice features. First, outing on BlueRing is stateless in the sensethat no outing information needs to be kept by any hostonce the ring is formed. This would be favorable fo environments such as Sma t Homes where computing capability islimited. Second, the architecture is scalable to median-sizescatternets easily (e.g.,around 50~70 Bluetooth units). Incomparison, most star-or tree-like scatternet topologies caneasily form a communication bottleneck at the root of thetree as the network enlarges. Third, maintaining a BlueRing is an easy job even as some Bluetooth units join or leavethe network.To tolerate single-point failure, we propose aprotocol-level remedy mechanism.To tolerate multi-pointfailure, we propose a recovery mechanism to reconnect theBlueRing. Graceful failure is tolerable as long as no twoo more critical points fail at the same time. As far aswe know, the fault-tolerant issue has not been properly addressed by existing scatternet protocols yet. In addition, we also evaluate the ideal network throughput at differentBlueRing sizes and configurations by mathematical analysis. Simulations results are presented, which demonstrate that BlueRing outperforms other scatternet structures withhigher network throughput and moderate packet delay.