Comparison of Bluetooth Interconnection Methods using BlueProbe

Many Bluetooth researches are targeted to form efficient scatternets. However, scatternets do not have much popularity in general because many Bluetooth devices do not support scatternet capabilities and high mobility makes it difficult to keep the connectivity. Instead we choose temporary interconnection of piconets to reduce scatternet formation overhead. To compare several interconnection methods, we propose BlueProbe. BlueProbe finds out the allocated time slots size, which makes it apt for Bluetooth style TDMA capacity measurement. BlueProbe is applicable to both piconet and scatternet whether a cross traffic exists or not. Results based on our real testbed measurements show that the interconnection method is more important than the hop length and the number of simultaneous flows, whereas previous researches based on simulations concentrate on these two factors. Based on these results, we show efficient interconnection methods among Bluetooth Piconets.