Bottom-up construction of bluetooth topology under a traffic-aware scheduling scheme

Abstract

We propose a Bluetooth topology construction protocol that works in conjunction with a priority-based polling scheme. A master assigns a priority to its slaves including bridges for each polling cycle and then polls them as many times as the assigned priority. The slaves can spend their idle time either in a power-saving mode or perform new node discovery. The topology construction algorithm works in a bottom-up manner in which isolated nodes join to form small piconets. These small piconets can combine to form larger piconets. Larger piconets can start sharing bridge nodes to form a scatternet. Individual piconets can also discover new nodes while participating in the master-driven polling process. The shutting down of master and slave nodes is detected for dynamic restructuring of the scatternet. The protocol can handle situations when all the Bluetooth nodes are not within radio range of each other. © 2007 IEEE.