Time analysis of the handover procedure in a Bluetooth network

Handover in a Bluetooth scatternet is studied. The inquiry procedure defined by the Bluetooth standard to create and manage an ad-hoc network could also be used to perform handover, but is too slow to keep communication active. An on-demand procedure, based on accurate paging, is proposed. The parameters needed to perform the handover are exchanged when necessary, thus information is not required to be stored on the devices. The handover performance is studied by giving a statistical description of the time needed to terminate it. We show that handover in a reasonable time is feasible, and is suitable for many of the asynchronous communications applications envisaged for Bluetooth.