TARP: A traffic-aware restructuring protocol for Bluetooth radio networks

Bluetooth is a low-cost and short-range wireless communication technology. The Bluetooth device randomly searches and connects with other devices using the inquiry/inquiry scan and the page/page scan operations, resulting an uncontrolled scatternet topology. The unpredictable scatternet topology usually raises the problem of redundant traffic and causes inefficient communications. A traffic-aware restructuring protocol (TARP) is presented for partially restructuring a piconet or a pair of two neighboring piconets by applying role switch mechanism. The proposed TARP mainly consists of intra-piconet and inter-piconet restructuring protocols. According to the recent routes and their traffic load information, the intra-piconet restructuring protocol adjusts piconet structure by selecting the proper device to play a master role of a piconet and applies takeover operation to rapidly restructure the piconet topology. The inter-piconet restructuring protocol exchanges devices of two neighboring piconets to reduce the route length and thus improve the power and bandwidth consumptions and the end-to-end transmission delay. Performance results reveal that the proposed restructuring protocols reduce path length of recent routes and save power consumption, thus significantly improve the performance for a given connected scatternet.