| A Wireless Personal Area Network (WPAN) is an ad hoc network that consists of de- vices that surround an individual or an object. BluetoothRTM technology is especially suitable for formation of WPANs due to the pervasiveness of devices with BluetoothRTM chipsets, its operation in the unlicensed Industrial, Scientific, Medical (ISM) frequency band, and its interference resilience. BluetoothRTM technology has great potential to become the de facto standard for communication between heterogeneous devices in WPANs.;The piconet, which is the basic BluetoothRTM networking unit, utilizes a Master/Slave (MS) configuration that permits only a single master and up to seven active slave devices. This structure limitation prevents BluetoothRTM devices from directly participating in larger Mobile Ad Hoc Networks (MANETs) and Wireless Personal Area Networks (WPANs). In order to build larger BluetoothRTM topologies, called scatternets, individual piconets must be interconnected. Since each piconet has a unique frequency hopping sequence, piconet interconnections are done by allowing some nodes, called bridges, to participate in more than one piconet. These bridge nodes divide their time between piconets by switching between Frequency Hopping (FH) channels and synchronizing to the piconet's master.;In this dissertation we address scatternet formation, routing, and security to make BluetoothRTM scatternet communication feasible. We define criteria for efficient scatternet topologies, describe characteristics of different scatternet topology models as well as compare and contrast their properties, classify existing scatternet formation approaches based on the aforementioned models, and propose a distributed scatternet formation algorithm that efficiently forms a scatternet topology and is resilient to node failures.;We propose a hybrid routing algorithm, using a bridge link agnostic approach, that provides on-demand discovery of destination devices by their address or by the services that devices provide to their peers, by extending the Service Discovery Protocol (SDP) to scatternets.;We also propose a link level security scheme that provides secure communication between adjacent piconet masters, within what we call an Extended Scatternet Neighborhood (ESN).;KEYWORDS: Wireless Personal Area Network (WPAN), Bluetooth, Piconet, Scatternet Formation, Scatternet Routing... |
