A Fair and Traffic Dependent Scheduling Algorithm for Bluetooth Scatternets

The Bluetooth specification defines the notion of interconnected piconets, called scatternets, but does not define the actual mechanisms and algorithms necessary to set up and maintain them. The operation of a scatternet requires some Bluetooth units to be inter-piconet units (gateways), which need to time-division multiplex their presence among their piconets. This requires a scatternet-scheduling algorithm that can schedule the presence of these units in an efficient manner. In this paper, we propose a distributed scatternet-scheduling scheme that is implemented using the HOLD mode of Bluetooth and adapts to non-uniform and changing traffic. Another attribute of the scheme is that it results in fair allocation of bandwidth to each Bluetooth unit. This scheme provides an integrated solution for both intra- and inter-piconet scheduling, i.e., for polling of slaves and scheduling of gateways.