Distributed Self-Healing Bluetooth Scatternet Formation

A Bluetooth scatternet is a scalable network topology that is formed by inter-connecting piconets. Piconets are the basic networking unit for Bluetooth devices, but can only accommodate up to eight devices; one master and seven slaves. In order to form scatternets, piconets can be inter-connected using bridge nodes that interleave their participation in multiple piconets. In this paper we present a new fault-tolerant approach to scatternet formation that is self-healing and works in a multi-hop environment. Our approach allows incremental node arrival and automatically heals partitions in the scatternet by reincorporating disconnected nodes. We also restrict the assignment of bridges to pure slaves, which reduces wasted time-slots when a master/slave bridge is away from the piconet.