A three-phase ad hoc network formation protocol for Bluetooth systems

Bluetooth is considered attractive as a means of building an instantaneous ad hoc network consisting of personal devices. However, Bluetooth-based ad hoc networking raises several issues due to the characteristics of the technology such as spread spectrum and the asymmetric communication model. In this paper, we propose a network formation model that considers the technical characteristics of Bluetooth. The proposed model identifies three essential phases that a Bluetooth system must implement to form an ad hoc network, namely, (1) neighbor discovery, (2) neighbor grouping, and (3) role assignment. Each of these phases introduces several design trade-offs, producing a design space that encompasses previously proposed designs as well as new designs. Based on this observation, we propose a new ad hoc network formation protocol called Bluestars. The proposed protocol has nice properties such as shorter average distance between nodes, higher reachability between nodes, and lower overheads associated with an addition of new nodes, yet it is simple enough to be implemented in a small system.