Designing a Roaming Protocol for Bluetooth Networks

Bluetooth is an established standard for low cost, low power, wireless personal area network. Currently, Bluetooth does not support any roaming protocol in which handoff occurs dynamically when a Bluetooth device is moving out of the piconet. If a device is loosing its connection to the master device, no provision is made to transfer it to another master. Handoff is not possible in a piconet, as in order to stay within the network, a slave would have to keep the same master. So, by definition intra-handoff is not possible within a piconet. This research mainly focuses on Bluetooth technology and designing a roaming protocol for Bluetooth networks. Roaming in Bluetooth network can be carried out in two steps, the first step is seamless handover between similar base stations and the second step is to implement handover functionality in between different base stations. The advantage of designing a roaming protocol is to ensure the Bluetooth enabled roaming device can freely move inside the network coverage without losing its connection or break of service in case of changing the base stations