Abstract Peer-to-peer connectivity between mobile phones using technologies such as Bluetooth has given a new dimension to the mobile communication. Peers through the help of various underlying protocols can form piconets and scatternets to transparently communicate the content across the network. There however are issues like reliability in communication, delay and the cost of communication that need to be considered before resorting to this form of communication. This paper presents a study where opportunistic concept such as Bubble Rap is tested in Bluetooth ad hoc networking environment. The notion behind this research is to study the properties of these two networking environments, since opportunistic networks are derived from ad hoc networks. Thus, study of these two different environments yet related to each other may help us find new ways of message forwarding in Bluetooth communication environment. This paper is aimed at investigating the behaviour of nodes present in Bluetooth static scatternet environment by 1) studying message transfer from a source to destination using traditional ad hoc communication protocols such as AODV and 2) message transfer using opportunistic algorithms such as Bubble Rap on top of traditional ad hoc communication. This paper also proposes a concept of ranking to transfer messages to the node that has higher social centrality ranking compared to the current node. Nodes with varying social ranking are allowed to join piconets and forward messages based on Bubble Rap concept in scatternet environment. In BR algorithm, nodes forward messages to only those encountering nodes which are more popular than the current node
