Improving the performance of Bluetooth piconets with synchronous and asynchronous traffic

The Bluetooth specification allows both asynchronous (ACL) and synchronous (SCO) links to be present in a piconet. However, the performance of ACL traffic rapidly deteriorates when an SCO link is present. This paper investigates the possibility of replacing the Bluetooth SCO connection with a QoS-constrained asynchronous link that uses multi-slot ACL packets. We have analyzed the performance of this scheme, dubbed pseudo-SCO, under limited service and exhaustive service scheduling. It was found that the pseudo-SCO scheme allows asynchronous traffic to experience lower delays than with the regular SCO connection, while supporting the bandwidth requirements of SCO traffic.