Enhancing performance of asynchronous data traffic over the bluetooth wireless ad-hoc network

Abstract

Emerging technologies such as Bluetooth are expected to become a ubiquitous solution for providing short range, low power, low cost, pico-cellular wireless connectivity. Bluetooth is a Master driven Time Division Duplex (TDD) system that supports an asynchronous channel for data traffic as well as synchronous channels for voice traffic. Data applications running over Bluetooth such as http, ftp and real audio will need transport layer protocols such as TCP and UDP to send packets over the wireless links. In this paper we study several schemes designed to improve the performance of asynchronous data traffic over a Bluetooth piconet that supports multiple active slaves. We propose and compare a number of SAR policies and MAC scheduling algorithms with a view towards enhancing the performance of transport layer sessions. We investigate the effect of different FEC and ARQ schemes at the baseband level, using a two-state Markov channel model for the Bluetooth RF link. We also study how the presence of circuit-switched voice impacts the performance of data traffic.