Efficient Policies for Increasing Capacity in Bluetooth: An Indoor Pico-Cellular Wireless System

Manish Kalia, Sumit Garg, Rajeev Shorey IBM India Research Laboratory, Block 1, Indian Institute of Technology, Hauz Khas, New Delhi 110016, India. Email: [email protected], Phone: 91-11-6861100, Fax: 91-11-6861555 Abstract—In indoor pico-cellular wireless systems, such as Bluetooth1 , a pico-cell has a Master-Slave configuration. Bluetooth is a Centralized Master driven system that supports Time Division Duplex Medium Access Control. A pico-cell has a limit on the maximum number of active Slaves. In Bluetooth, a pico-cell can have a maximum of seven Slaves in active state (capable of transmitting and receiving data). The remaining Slaves in a pico-cell remain in an inactive state. Having more than seven slaves connected to the Master can be advantageous in many situations. Having a large number of Slaves in one pico-cell as compared to forming new picocells can lead to lower power consumption and a relatively simple network architecture. In this paper we investigate different methods of increasing the capacity of Bluetooth pico-cells. We propose new policies using the Park mode to increase the number of Slaves virtually connected to a Master. These policies can have a significant impact on system parameters such as the throughput, packet delays and dropping probability of packets.