An Overlapping Communication Protocol Using Improved Time-Slot Leasing for Bluetooth WPANs

In this paper, we propose an overlapping communication protocol using improved time-slot leasing in the Bluetooth WPANS. One or many slave–master–slave communications usually exist in a piconet of the Bluetooth network. A fatal communication bottleneck is incurred in the master node if many slave–master–slave communications are required at the same time. To alleviate the problem, an overlapping communication scheme is presented to allow slave node directly and simultaneously communicates with another slave node to replace with the original slave–master–slave communication works in a piconet. This overlapping communication scheme is based on the improved time-slot leasing (TSL) scheme which modified from the original TSL, while the original TSL scheme only provides the slave-to-slave communication capability. The key contribution of our improved TSL scheme is to offer the overlapping communication capability. With the overlapping communication scheme, we developed an overlapping communication protocol in a Bluetooth WPANs. Finally, simulation results demonstrate that our developed communication protocol achieves the performance improvements on bandwidth utilization, transmission delay time, network congestion, and energy consumption. r 2008 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.