Improving Bluetooth network performance through a time-slot leasing approach

Bluetooth is a promising technology aiming at supporting short-range wireless communication. To achieve the advantage of simplicity and low-power, the master/slave model is used. However, this model has some drawbacks since no direct link exists between any two slaves in a piconet. Consequently, slave-to-slave communications must go through the master, and the master has to use extra bandwidth to forward the packets exchanged between slaves. In this paper, we propose a time-slot leasing (TSL) and an enhanced TSL (ETSL) approach to address these drawbacks. Simulation results demonstrate that the TSL approach, especially the ETSL approach, can significantly improve the system performance compared to the standard master/slave model. Keywords—Bluetooth, ad hoc networks, leasing, piconet.