Packet interference in a heterogeneous cluster of Bluetooth piconets

In a Bluetooth piconet, the master essentially controls the channel. Due to an absence of coordination between independent masters while accessing the wireless medium, devices will encounter high packet interference if several piconets are simultaneously operating in the same area. Since even a headset and a mobile phone can be connected with a Bluetooth link, forming a piconet, it may not be unusual to find tens of independent piconets in crowded places like airports, international conferences, shopping malls, and so on. The study of packet interference gains importance, because it affects throughput of a piconet. Considering that all the portable devices can have a Bluetooth interface and people are highly mobile these days, it is not uncommon to find a cluster of piconets of both the 79-hop and the 23-hop types in the same area. In this paper, we present an analytical model of packet interference in a heterogeneous cluster of Bluetooth masters. By a heterogeneous cluster, we mean a cluster of piconets consisting of 23-hop and 79-hop types. Our analytic model is based on the idea of probabilistic graphs, where a node denotes a piconet and an edge denotes the probability of interference between two nodes.