Research On Bluetooth Scatternet Formation Based On Distributed Self-Healing Approach

Bluetooth technology is an open global specification for wireless data and voice communication. Based on low-cost short-distance wireless communication, Bluetooth becomes a communication technology that provides special connections for landline and mobile devices. Because it has many intriguing characteristics, such as low cost, low power consumption, small size, and free spectrum.With the development and popularization of Bluetooth techlogy, there is increasing interest in wireless ad hoc networks. The Bluetooth personal area network, which is composed of multi-devices, is one of the typical Ad hoc networks. There are two kinds of network formations, piconet and scatternet. The Bluetooth personal area network can either work independently or connect to Internet and other wireless networks. The Bluetooth personal area network is designed for the application scenes of homes and small offices. It can be used for voice communication, data transmission, the connection and automatic information exchange of electrical devices and etc. But the certain constraints of Bluetooth bring new challenges in constructing and maintenancing a wireless ad hoc network with Bluetooth devices.To construct a determinate Bluetooth network topology, Bluetooth devices inquire each other, construct point-to-point physical connection, synchronize frequency-hopping sequence, exchange essential address and clock information. Better topology algorithm can carry out these steps faster to make nodes within communication range to form steady networks. Once Bluetooth scatternet topology is constructed, it will considerably influence the whole network routing and scheduling. We analyze the Bluetooth protocol, the characteristics of frequency hopping and master-to-slave mode, so it is proposed that the keystone in Bluetooth network researching is the construction of topology.The whole work is divided into three parts.Firstly, The Bluetooth personal area network, which is composed of multi-devices, is one of the typical Ad Hoc. The Ad Hoc wireless mobile network based on Bluetooth is a self-construction, self-organization and self-management wireless mobile network without additional network devices or manual configuration. The Bluetooth specification has not had feasible introduction on scatternet topology formation, packet routing, channel or link scheduling and access point. There is no algorithm could achieve the best performance of Bluetooth network, so these questions are all current leading and important research issues of Bluetooth technology.Secondly, this paper introduces and analyses several typical Bluetooth scatternet topologies and their formative processes in present articles, and gives simple contrast among these scatternets, that indicates that there are some deficiencies in present algorithms on network topologies self-healing. This paper also discusses familiar problems in dynamic networks such as slave nodes quit or malfunction, master nodes quit or malfunction, main bridge nodes quit or malfunction, subordinate bridge nodes quit or malfunction and so forth. Thereby we discuss improving topology algorithm, which can better adapt to dynamic condition, and we compare the performances of the network construction algorithms above. The standards to evaluate an algorithm is about: (1)the connectedness of the formed network, (2)average degree of the devices, (3)delay of the network, (4) the number of devices in each piconet, (5)the number roles assumed by each node, (6)self-healing of the network, (7)multi-hop characteristics, (8)the average number of the piconets, (9)routing robustness, (10)time complexity, (11)network diameter, (12)message complexity. Then the advantages and disadvantages of the various algorithms are pointed out. Finally, the demands of an algorithm are concluded and the important bridge node working mode is given.Finally,this paper proposes a dynamic Bluetooth scatternet topology algorithm, which is distributed and self-healing. Nodes are independent from each other which are located at random without messages about neighbors. This algorithm doesn't demand that the nodes are within communication range. The core of this algorithm is during the inquiry procedure. When a node in the inquiry scan state receives an ID packet, it responds with an Frequency Hop Synchronization(FHS) packet if it wishes to be discovered. It is proposed that the five bits which is not used in an FHS packet for the inquiry response can be employed to convey some additional information. For example, 2 bits represent the node energy status, 2 bits represent the information processing capacity of the node, 1 bit represents the node connectivity status. According to the inquiry procedure, the node can acquire the information of adjacent nodes. The principle of nodes election is mainly based on the following points: (1)The level of the node energy status, the highest energy level node is the generally selected node. (2)Among the same energy level nodes, the best information processing capacity level node is preferred. (3)On the basis of the former two principles, we tend to select the shortest distance nodes. According to the priority, the main central control node is selected. Finally a set of Bluetooth nodes which are unknown quantitatively, distributed evenly at random, independent from each other and not located within the communication range will connect with each other and form connected Bluetooth scatternet. The algorithm in this paper improves the robustness of the network. Once the nodes in the scatternet join or leave, the self-healing algorithm in this paper could detect and deal with it in time. It is detected by the priority scheduling of the brige node and the slave node. So this network can adapt to dynamic topology changes. This algorithm can also improve the ability of self-healing in Bluetooth network.In this paper, we adopt Bluehoc Bluetooth network simulation software platform based on NS2 in Linux operating system to simulate the Bluetooth dynamic topology algorithm and make the performance analysis compare with the TSF algorithm. The results show that this algorithm has the performance of both fast creating network and fast recovery time, the size of the piconet is between 7.5 and 8, which is almost in full state. It is a practical algorithm for constructing scatternet topology.