Performance of TCP traffic in Bluetooth piconets: a queueing theoretic analysis

Recent updates of the Bluetooth specification have introduced significant changes in the Bluetooth protocol stack, including optional flow control. When the Bluetooth piconet is used to carry TCP traffic, complex interactions between TCP congestion control mechanisms and data link layer controls of Bluetooth will occur. In this paper, we model the performance of the piconet with TCP traffic, expressed through segment loss probability, round-trip time, and goodput, through both probabilistic analysis and discrete-event simulations. We show that satisfactory performance for TCP traffic may be obtained through proper dimensioning of the Bluetooth architecture parameters.