On the Analysis of the Bluetooth Time Division Duplex Mechanism

Efficient communication in Bluetooth networks requires design of intra and inter-piconet scheduling algorithms, and therefore, numerous algorithms have been proposed. However, due to complexities of the Bluetooth MAC, the performance of these algorithms has been analyzed mostly via simulation. We present analytic results regarding the exhaustive, gated, and limited (pure round robin) scheduling algorithms in piconets with bidirectional and unidirectional traffic. We show that a piconet operated according to the limited scheduling algorithm is equivalent to a 1-limited polling system and present exact results regarding symmetric piconets with bidirectional traffic. Then, the difficulties in analyzing the performance of the exhaustive and gated algorithms in a piconet with bidirectional traffic are demonstrated. In addition, we present exact analytic results for piconets with unidirectional traffic. We show that, surprisingly, in symmetrical piconets with only uplink traffic, the mean waiting time is the same for the exhaustive and limited algorithms. This observation results from the differences between piconets and traditional polling systems and can be extended for time-division-duplex systems with arbitrary packet lengths. Furthermore, we show that the mean waiting time in a piconet with only uplink traffic is significantly higher than its corresponding value in a piconet with only downlink traffic. Finally, we numerically compare the exact results to approximate results, presented in the past.