Dynamic Congestion Control through backup relay in Bluetooth scatternet

Bluetooth is a low power wireless technology designed to connect various short-range devices such as laptops, cameras, cell-phones, head-phones, navigators, etc. Bluetooth has limited resources and its devices are connected in ad hoc fashion. The Bluetooth specification allows only eight active devices to communicate within its smallest networking unit known as piconet. Multiple piconets can be connected together through at least one common device, known as relay to form a bigger network called a scatternet. The performance of a scatternet is highly determined by the performance of the relay since it acts as a switch between multiple piconets, where inter-piconet scheduling is the main task to perform. However, the presence of too many relays in the network may cause inefficient use of the limited resources. In contrary, less number of relays may lead to congestion problem because each relay has to participate in multiple piconets and supports several connections. One possible solution is to reorganize the nodes in the scatternet, in order to increase the available bandwidth and to reduce the traffic flows on the congested link. Hence, primarily this paper addresses the issues of traffic congestion on a link by analyzing traffic load in the network. To achieve this, activation of a backup relay is performed by applying role-switching operation, and this technique is called Dynamic Congestion Control (DCC). With DCC, the route length is assured not to increase as to alleviate message and packet overheads in scheduling. The simulation results are evidence that DCC has reduced transmission delays and has increased the scatternet lifetime from 25% to 50% as compared to RVM and LORP techniques.