Investigation On Bluetooth Based Ad Hoc Network Formation Protocols

Mobile Ad hoc network is a special multihop wireless network without centralized administration and can be deployed without any infrastructure. Due to its characteristic of self-organizing, mobile Ad hoc network has become a research hotspot internationally in recent years. Bluetooth, a de facto global standard widely used in different fields for short-range wireless communication, is considered as one of the promising technologies to be used in Ad hoc networks. However, before it becomes reality, many challenging issues caused by the constraints and some characteristics of Bluetooth technology itself should be addressed, including network formation. Bluetooth specification hasn't addressed this issue in detail yet, and it's an open problem. Based on some network formation protocols presented in the literature, further research on this problem will be done in this thesis.In this thesis, the background of the study, the structure and contribution of the thesis, and the simulator used are introduced at first. And then, Bluetooth network topology related knowledge is introduced, moreover, the problem of performance evaluation of different Bluetooth network topologies is addressed, and a formula proposed in some other paper for estimating the average communication delay of a topology is modified to be more reasonable. In the third chapter, previous research on Bluetooth-based Ad hoc network formation is outlined, and several representative protocols are described in detail and compared briefly, including BTCP and DABTC. In the fourth part of the thesis, BTCP and DABTC are simulated with the simulator Bluehoc_Ex and performance analysis is made based on the simulation results. There are still many problems existing in DABTC protocol, for example, a node may page or scan paging from another node interminably when operating according to this protocol. Furthermore, converging separate networks and new nodes' joining the existing network are not enabled in this protocol, and the network can't heal automatically when it is partitioned due to some links' invalidation either. In the fifth chapter, some solutions are proposed to deal with these problems. These solutions are simulated and analysed too.At last, the thesis is summarized and future work is proposed.