Bluetooth scatternet formation of wireless devices based on maximal independent sets

Bluetooth standard allows the creation of piconets, with one node serving as its master and up to seven nodes serving as slaves. Additional slaves must be parked, with significant overhead involved for parking and unparking them. Although the standard allows for the creation of a collection of connected piconets, called scatternet, it does not give any particular protocol for it. Given a set of Bluetooth nodes which are positioned so that their unit disk graph is connected, the Bluetooth scatternet formation (BSF) problem is to select piconets, and master and slave roles in each piconet, so that the obtained scatternet is connected, has some desirable properties and good performance with respect to some metrics. This article describes a BSF protocol based on maximal independent sets. Simulations show its advantage over the best competing protocol.