Ad Hoc Routing for Bluetooth

Abstract: The number of Bluetooth equipped devices has increased tremendously over the last couple of years and many new products using Bluetooth are expected to be launched on the market. Bluetooth is a low cost, low power, short range radio technology, developed as a cable replacement to connect devices such as cellular phones, headsets, Personal Digital Assistants (PDA's) and so on. Bluetooth is a part of the Wireless Personal Area Network (WPAN). In a WPAN the members may be constantly changing as devices move in and out of range. A basic formation of a Bluetooth network is called a piconet, consisting of maximum eight devices, where one of the devices acts as master unit. The Bluetooth specification defines a method for the interconnection of piconets: the scatternet. A scatternet can be dynamically constructed in an ad hoc manner when some nodes belong, at the same time, to more than one piconet. The current Bluetooth specification only defines the notation of a scatternet but does not provide the mechanism to construct the scatternet. In order to make Bluetooth more suitable and efficient in an ad hoc environment routing algorithms are needed. However, routing algorithms are not defined in Bluetooth specification. The time-to-connect is essential when creating an ad hoc network. An implementation of the Modified Reverse Path Forwarding (MRPF) routing algorithm based on the original Reverse Path Forwarding (RPF) routing algorithm is evaluated. Empirical data are extracted and compared to the original. The results show that MRPF uses less number of connections and decreases the time-to-connect compared to the RPF algorithm.