Device Discovery in Bluetooth Networks: A Scatternet Perspective.

The paper concerns device discovery in multi-hop networks of Bluetooth devices. We start from the observation that forming a Bluetooth scatternet (i.e., a multi-hop wireless topology) requires each pair of neighboring nodes to have a "symmetric" knowledge of each other, i.e., if node u knows node v then node v knows node u. We investigate the use of the Bluetooth procedures for device discovery (inquiry procedures) in order to guarantee the needed symmetric knowledge for scatternet formation. Through the use of simulations we observed that despite the long time required for each node to become aware of the presence of all its neighbors, the Bluetooth topologies obtained by using the devices discovered after just 6 seconds are connected. The average number of neighbors of each node and the average route length are also consistently close to the values that we would obtain if all the neighbors of a device were discovered. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]