Enhancing Bluetooth scheduler with predictive link capacity assignment plus multi-slot framing

Abstract

Unlike most wireless techniques, Bluetooth uses time division duplex (TDD) to arrange the transmission slots so that it can avoid the collisions. In a Bluetooth piconet, a master node coordinates up to seven active slave nodes, which implies up to fourteen different active virtual links. The schedulers of the devices, especially the one in the master node, are in charge of all the transmission disciplines. Therefore, the policy of the scheduler will affect the networks performance of the piconet, like delay and throughput. Currently the Bluetooth scheduler uses a round robin policy to distribute the slots for different links. An enhancement scheme is presented by introducing the predictive link capacity assignment plus the multi-slot framing. The advantages of the corresponding methods is discussed, which lead to a possible practical design of a new scheduler that exploits a better performance of a Bluetooth piconet.