UMTS-TDD: a solution for internetworking Bluetooth piconets in indoor environments

The standards that are supposed to play a leading role in third-generation mobile telecommunication and personal area networks in the near future are the Universal Mobile Telecommunication System (UMTS) and the Bluetooth (BT) radio technology, respectively. In this paper, we advocate that a hybrid architecture of UMTS and Bluetooth can take advantage of the complementary characteristics of these two technologies and provide a total solution for an indoor communication environment. We envision a cooperating scenario in which small Bluetooth networks (scatternets) offer basic wireless connectivity to several peripheral units scattered over small areas, while indoor UMTS supports communication among scatternets and provides wireless access to the Internet. We focus our analysis on a centralized topology, in which communication occurs only between the peripheral units and the access point. This topology can be used in many different application scenarios and represents an example of cooperation between 3G and PAN technologies. In addition to describing the architecture, we address the issue of fair capacity allocation in such a centralized topology and provide some analytic and simulation results for the topology considered.