Abstract—A mobile ad-hoc network (MANET) is a collection of wireless mobile nodes, which creates a temporary network. Bluetooth is one of the emerging communication standards of MANET. Bluetooth allows communication through a basic network, which is called piconet. A piconet has one master and at most seven active slaves. There can be multiple piconets in a Bluetooth network, which is called a scatternet. Communication among multiple piconets is achieved through a common node known as a relay. Bluetooth allows synchronize transmission, therefore, packet transmission may always have unreliable links caused by relay node mobility. This degrades the system performance. Devices follow broadcast mechanisms to find an alternative route when a link breaks. A large number of broadcast route requests increase control overheads and consume a large amount of power to send and receive control messages. Thus, this paper proposes a Link Repairing for Inter-piconet Communication (LRIC) technique for a Bluetooth Scatternet to recover lost links efficiently. The proposed LRIC achieves several advantages i.e. minimizing the number of control messages, increasing throughput and reducing network delay. The simulation results show that the proposed technique outperforms existing techniques; the LRIC reduces 20% to 30% message overhead and increases 15% to 20% throughput.

Index Terms—Bluetooth, broken link, link repair, packet reliability, scatternet.

The authors are with the Department of Computer and Informaiton Sciences, Universiti Teknologi PETRONAS, Bandar Seri Iskandar, 31750 Tronoh, Perak, Malaysia.

Cite: Sabeen Tahir, Abas Md Said, and Sheikh Tahir Bakhsh, "Link Repairing for Inter-Piconet Communication Technique in Bluetooth Scatternet," International Journal of Computer and Electrical Engineering vol. 4, no. 4, pp. 582-587, 2012.