A locally coordinated scatternet scheduling algorithm

There is growing interest in wireless personal area networks built from portable devices equipped with short-range radio interfaces such as Bluetooth. These small networks (called piconets) can be internetworked to form larger scatternets by means of bridge nodes that participate in more than one piconet on a time division basis. How well this works depends to a large part on the mechanism used to schedule communication across piconets. In this paper, we present a novel online scatternet scheduling algorithm, LCS, that effectively coordinates one-hop neighbors to converge to an efficient scatternet-wide communication schedule. Unlike previous work, LCS is robust and responsive to network conditions, dynamically adjusting the schedule based on varying workload conditions. We demonstrate that LCS has good performance on throughput, end-to-end packet latency and energy usage under various traffic loads.