An Efficient Link Polling Policy by Pattern Matching for Bluetooth Piconets

Bluetooth has a master–slave configuration called a piconet. Unspecified in the Bluetooth standard, the link polling policy adopted by a master may significantly influence the bandwidth utilization of a piconet. Several works have been dedicated to this issue. However, none of them addresses the asymmetry of traffics between masters and slaves, and the different data packet types provided by Bluetooth are not fully exploited. In this paper, we propose an efficient pattern matching polling (PMP) policy for data link scheduling that properly resolves these deficiencies. A polling pattern is a sequence of Bluetooth packets of different type combinations (e.g. DH1/DH3/DH5/DM1/DM3/DM5) to be exchanged by a master–slave pair that can properly reflect the traffic ratio (i.e. asymmetry) of the pair. By judiciously selecting a proper polling pattern together with polling times for the link, the precious wireless bandwidth can be better utilized. The ultimate goal is to reduce the unfilled, or even null, payloads in each busy slot. In addition, an overflow mechanism is included to handle unpredictable traffic dynamics. Extensive simulations are presented to justify the capability of PMP in handling regular as well as bursty traffics.