Accelerating Bluetooth inquiry for personal area networks

Abstract

The recent industry standard Bluetooth promises low cost replacement of communication cabling with moderate symbol-rate, short-range wireless links. The same specification also addresses the establishment of point-to-multipoint piconets and the interconnection of several of these piconets into scatternets, enabling Bluetooth to be used as a technology for realizing personal area networks. Establishing Bluetooth piconets requires nodes to discover each other by completing an inquiry phase. This paper investigates the inquiry phase; shows the shortcomings of the current inquiry procedure in multi node-PAN scenarios, and outlines and analyses a backwards Bluetooth compliant modification to accelerate Bluetooth inquiry. Extensive simulations comparing the original and the proposed Bluetooth inquiry schemes show improvements of more than an order of magnitude in device discovery times.