A bandwidth-based polling scheme for QoS support in Bluetooth

A flexible bandwidth management scheme namely Bandwidth-based Polling (BBP) for Bluetooth is proposed. A framing structure of time is defined in BBP, and the master allocates proper number of slots for each active slave in a frame. BBP allows the master to poll a slave more than once to achieve high flexibility for bandwidth allocation. The calculation of the polling time as well as the payload type for a slave is according to the bandwidth requirement of the slave and the limit of the frame size controlled by the master. Extension of BBP for supporting slaves with the SCO link and slaves without bandwidth requirement (best-effort slaves) is also proposed. Simulation results have shown the efficiency and fairness of BBP in bandwidth management. The flexibility of bandwidth allocation depends on the maximum polling time preset by BBP. A larger maximum polling time makes the higher flexibility of bandwidth allocation at the expense of a longer latency before reaching the equilibrium state. Analysis of the impact of the maximum polling time on bandwidth allocation is also presented in the paper. q 2004 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.