Specification and analysis of a Bluetooth handoff protocol for real-time applications

Wireless Personal Area Networks (WPANs) have been widely used due to the development of new wireless technologies, mainly Bluetooth. As user mobility is the focus of WPANs some questions arise when developing applications for it, specifically handoff management. Despite Bluetooth having been used for WPAN applications it does not have facilities for handoff management. It provides inquiry and paging operations that have priority over application data in the interface. This property has an impact for real-time applications. In this work a Bluetooth handoff management is modelled and analysed using Coloured Petri Nets. All the signalling and message exchanging are done by access points and never by the mobile devices during handoff. Moreover, the protocol uses only standard Bluetooth operations.