Distributed, Robust, and Self-Organizing Bluetooth Scatternet Formation

Bluetooth is a promising low-cost low-power short-range radio technology for wireless personal area networks. The basic network unit in Bluetooth is a centralized master-slave topology named piconet. The piconets can be further interconnected to form a multi-hop ad hoc network known as a scatternet. The properties of scatternets pose new challenges for constructing an efficient topology. In this paper, we present a novel distributed approach for scatternet formation which works efficiently even when all the devices are not in range of each other. We validate the efficiency of our approach through simulations demonstrating that the scatternet formed has fast connection establishment time and O(log n) diameter for a network of n devices. For the case of all-in-range devices, our protocol achieves close to the the minimum number of piconets. Based on the implicit fault-tolerant nature of our protocol, we extend it with a self-healing mechanism to work well under mobile environments. Our simulation results indicate the robust nature of the formed scatternet when nodes join and leave arbitrarily. To the best of our knowledge, this is a first attempt that addresses scatternet formation for dynamic environments as well as when all the devices are not in communication range of each other.