Assessing Bluetooth scatternet formation

The interconnection of piconets in Bluetooth networking has received considerable attention, as surveyed in Whitaker et al. (2004). Whilst a variety of scatternet formation protocols have been proposed, a persistent problem is the comparison of protocol performance, and the quality of the Bluetooth network produced. Knowledge of best possible networks is important because this gives a concrete benchmark against which decentralized protocols can be compared. In this paper, we introduce a new meta-heuristic framework for optimal scatternet formation that operates in a centralised manner. Given device locations, this is capable of exploring the search space of all possible scatternets to find high performance networks, taking into account multiple and tenuous objectives, which can be specified by the user. We present results from ongoing research in this area. Our approach is being used to support a forthcoming online benchmarking facility for Bluetooth scatternets (www.scatternet.org), which will supply a suite of common test problems, metrics and results for use in the development, testing and comparison of decentralised scatternet formation protocols.