Energy-efficient interference avoidance for interconnected Bluetooth personal area networks

A Bluetooth personal area network (PAN) supports wireless communications among devices within short range. Since PAN-devices are usually battery powered, the protocols applied in PAN should employ economic energy usage. Basic networking entity in Bluetooth is piconet and piconets can be interconnected into a scatternet. Since the piconets in scatternet are not mutually coordinated at the medium access layer, there is an interpiconet interference, which can seriously degrade the communication performance and cause energy wasting. In this paper we propose a distributed algorithm for interference avoidance in Bluetooth scatternets. The algorithm avoids collision by ensuring distributed consensus among piconets in case of concurrent transmission. The overhead introduced by the algorithm is low, while there are high gains in energy efficiency and throughput.