Differentiated scheduling for Bluetooth QoS with parameter optimization

Abstract

This paper considers an efficient scheduling policy for Bluetooth Medium Access Control (MAC) and its parameter optimization method. The proposed algorithm improves performance as well as supports Quality of Service (QoS) simultaneously. Since Bluetooth is basically operated with a Round Robin (RR) scheduling policy, many slots may be wasted by POLL or NULL packets when there is no data waiting for transmission in the queues of the polled pair. To overcome this link wastage problem, several algorithms have been proposed. However, they have some limitations such as a heavy signaling overhead or no consideration of QoS. Therefore. we have proposed an efficient Bluetooth MAC scheduling algorithm, Differentiated K-Fairness Policy (Diff-KFP), which guarantees improved throughput and delay performance, and it can also lead to differentiated services. That is, if the parameter of the proposed algorithm is optimized, we can satisfy the QoS requirement of each master slave pair and thereby keep communications in progress from interruption, which is a source of throughput degradation. Simulation results show that our algorithm has remarkably improved the performance and gratifies the QoS requirements of various applications.