Providing mobile LAN access capability for Bluetooth devices

In this paper, we design and implement a Bluetooth system with mobile LAN access capability. First, by adding a virtual network interface card (NIC) driver between IP and Bluetooth protocol stack, Bluetooth users can use their Bluetooth devices to access the LAN resources via the Bluetooth access points. Besides, to accommodate with the mobility characteristics in Bluetooth network, we also propose a new handoff scheme. Instead of passively waiting for a handoff indication by the expiration of link supervision timer, in this paper, we detect a handoff actively and promptly by measuring the RSSI (receive signal strength indication) value. In addition, our proposed handoff scheme eliminates the inquiry procedure and only requires paging procedure during a handoff. We have implemented a prototype of Bluetooth system with mobile LAN access capability by our proposed scheme. Experimented results show that the handoff duration is significant reduced than the normal scheme.