An Empirical Study of Bluetooth Scatternet Formation Protocol

This paper describes the in depth performance comparison and evaluation among three major solutions for forming multi-hop networks of Bluetooth devices (scatternet formation). The three protocols considered in this paper are BlueTrees, BlueStars, and the "new protocol". By means of a thorough performance evaluation, protocol parameters and Bluetooth technology features that affect the duration of device discovery, have been identified. The effect of the different protocols' operations on key metrics of the generated scatternets is also analyzed in this paper. The comparative performance evaluation showed that due to the simplicity of its operations and to its basic working requirements, BlueStars is by far the fastest protocol for scatternet formation. However, BlueStars produces scatternets with an unbounded, possibly large number of slaves per piconet, which imposes the use of potentially inefficient Bluetooth operations. A good compromise when interested in forming scatternets whose piconets have a bounded number of slaves is obtained by the New protocol. The comparative study presented in this paper clearly identifies the key features of a scatternet formation protocol that affects its performance