Scheduling Mobile Data Services in a Bluetooth

Public buses play an important role in public transportation in most parts of the world and it is still the dominant public transportation mode in some regions. Nowadays, as people switch to a mobile lifestyle, they spend significant amount of time on the traveling to work, back and forth. However, not much research has been done on how to provide some on-board service for those commuters in the public bus. This paper presents a Bluetooth-based system which is inexpensive, yet flexible, and scalable to serve commuters in a personalized manner using Bluetooth enabled mobile phones. However, from the Bluetooth specification, one Bluetooth dongle can connect to at most seven other Bluetooth devices. As we expect more than 7 users to use the services provided in the Bluetooth-based system (a full double-deck bus can carry around 100 passengers), we need to work out an effective scheduler to schedule all the private services on the Bluetooth servers in the bus. This paper also describes a scheduling algorithm that exploits the park mode feature of the Bluetooth specification to allow more users to have access to the Bluetooth services on the bus.