Flow-fair Intra-Piconet (FliP) Scheduling for Communications in Personal Area Networks

As a building step of designing integrated solution for forming multi-hop Personal Area Networks (PANs) of Bluetooth devices, in this paper we introduce a new intra-piconet scheduling protocol that defines the interaction among masters and slaves with an eye to the flows passing through their piconets. Differently from previous intrapiconet solutions, such as Pure Round Robin, its E-limited variation, and the more recent Credit Scheme, fairness and traffic adaptivity is now achieved on a per-flow basis. Our FLow-fair Intra-Piconet (FℓIP) scheduling identifies the flows passing through each piconet slave. Based on this information the master can efficiently manage intra-piconet resources. FℓIP is compared with the three leading solutions for intra-piconet scheduling mentioned. Through ns2-based simulations we show that FℓIP is effective in decreasing both packet drop rate as well as end-to-end packet latency. © 2008 IEEE.