Performance of Bluetooth bridges in scatternets with exhaustive service scheduling

The performance of two Bluetooth piconets linked through a bridge device is analyzed using the tools of queuing theory. We analyze both the master/slave (MS) and slave/slave (SS) bridge topologies; in both cases, the piconet master polls its slaves according to the exhaustive scheduling policy. Analytical results are derived for the probability distribution of access delay (i.e., the time that a packet has to wait before being serviced) and end-to-end delay for both intra- and inter-piconet bursty traffic. SS bridge has been found to offer lower access delay and local end-to-end delay than its MS counterpart. MS bridge provides lower non-local end-to-end delay, due to the smaller number of hops (three, instead of four) for such traffic. All analytical results have been confirmed through simulations.