A New BlueRing Scatternet Topology for Bluetooth with Its Formation, Routing, and Maintenance Protocols

Abstract

The basic networking unit in Bluetooth is piconet, and a larger-area Bluetooth network can be formed by multiple piconets, called scatternet. However, the structure of scatternets is not defined in the Bluetooth specification and remains as an open issue at the designers' choice. It is desirable to have simple yet ecient scatternet topologies with well supports of routing protocols, considering that Bluetooths are to be used for personal-area networks with design goals of simplicity and compactness. In the literature, although many routing protocols have been proposed for mobile ad hoc networks, directly applying them poses a problem due to Bluetooth's special baseband and MAC-layer features. In this work, we propose an attractive scatternet topology called BlueRing which connects piconets as a ring interleaved by bridges between piconets, and address its formation, routing, and topology maintenance protocols. The BlueRing architecture enjoys the following nice features. First, routing on BlueRing is stateless in the sense that no routing information needs to be kept by any host once the ring is formed. This ould be favourable..