Flow-fair Intra-Piconet (FℓIP) scheduling for communications in personal area networks

Abstract

As a building step of designing integrated solution for forming multi-hop personal area networks (PANs) of Bluetooth devices, in this paper we introduce a new intra-piconet scheduling protocol that defines the interaction among masters and slaves with an eye to the flows passing through their piconets. Differently from previous intra- piconet solutions, such as pure round robin, its E-limited variation, and the more recent credit scheme, fairness and traffic adaptivity is now achieved on a per-flow basis. Our flow-fair intra-piconet (F^IP) scheduling identifies the flows passing through each piconet slave. Based on this information the master can efficiently manage intra-piconet resources. FlIP is compared with the three leading solutions for intra-piconet scheduling mentioned. Through ns2-based simulations we show that FlIP is effective in decreasing both packet drop rate as well as end-to-end packet latency.