Performance Simulation of TCP/IP over a Bluetooth Ad-hoc Network

Abstract. Bluetooth is a short-range radio link which originally was developed to eliminate cables between portable and/or fixed communicating devices. Bluetooth wireless technology is a de facto standard, as well as a specification for small-form factor, low-cost, short range radio links between mobile PCs, mobile phones and other portable devices. Today Bluetooth is a true ad-hoc wireless network intended for both synchronous traffic, e.g. voice, and asynchronous traffic, e.g. IP-based data traffic. In this paper we analyse the efficiency of the Bluetooth concept when carrying TCP/IP traffic. The analysis is carried out by means of simulations where the essential mechanisms in the Bluetooth protocols as well as those in the IP and TCP Vegas protocols are modelled in detail. A number of scenarios are presented and analysed and we show that TCP throughput can be kept quite high over the normally noisy radio channel, not at least due to the effective ARQ in Bluetooth where retransmissions are made immediately after a packet error.