Talk and let talk: performance of Bluetooth piconets with synchronous traffic

This paper investigates the possibility of replacing the Bluetooth SCO connection with a QoS-constrained asynchronous link that uses multi-slot ACL packets. We have analyzed the performance of this scheme, dubbed pseudo-SCO, under three different scheduling policies: limited service, exhaustive service, and E-limited service, using the theory of M[x]/G/1 queues with vacations. It was found that the pseudo-SCO scheme allows asynchronous traffic to experience much lower access and end-to-end delays than with the regular SCO connection, while supporting the bandwidth requirements of SCO traffic. The E-limited service scheduling policy was found to provide better performance than the other two policies, and its performance may be tuned to minimize the end-to-end packet delays under known traffic burstiness; moreover, it is able to guarantee minimum bandwidth for asynchronous traffic. Analytical results were confirmed through simulations.