A switch model for improving throughput and power fairness in Bluetooth piconets

In this paper, a model for N mobile nodes that talk to one another simultaneously is considered under the following constraint: No node may transmit and receive at the same time. Furthermore, we focus on a Personal Area Network (PAN) application limiting the network to a single-hop ad-hoc network. The resulting half-duplex wireless network is an interesting special case of the general full-duplex multi-hop ad-hoc networks. We model the system of the wireless channel and the N nodes as an N×N switch. We call a PAN based on this model a Switched PAN (S-PAN). The model is motivated by some limitations of the current specification of Bluetooth and by recent amendments of the rules governing the free-license ISM bands by the Federal Communications Commission. A specific Bluetooth-based S-PAN network that requires minimal changes to the current Bluetooth specification is introduced. The Bluetooth-based S-PAN is shown to outperform the current Bluetooth specification in throughput, delay, and energy-fairness to masters. Specifically, the S-PAN piconet is shown to achieve a throughput of up to 5 times (and possibly higher) the throughput of an equivalent Bluetooth piconet.