Throughput, Energy and Path Length Tradeoffs
in Bluetooth Scatternets

UCLA CSD Technical Report TR040031
09-28-2004

Csaba Kiss Kallo, Mauro Brunato
Dipartimento di Informatica e Telecomunicazioni
Università di Trento, Trento, Italy
Email: kkcsaba,brunato@dit.unitn.it

Sewook Jung, Ling-Jyh Chen, Mario Gerla
Department of Computer Science
University of California, Los Angeles
Email: sewookj,cclljj,gerla@cs.ucla.edu

Abstract:
In this work we determine an analytical relationship
between the average path length of traffic connections of a
Bluetooth scatternet and the overall throughput and power
consumption of the network.
Results obtained implementing this analytical relationship to
different scatternet topologies are presented and discussed. By
reducing the hop count in a scatternet we can achieve better
performance in terms of throughput and power consumption.
Therefore, the issue of minimizing the hop count in the presence
of mobility, changing traffic flows and varying interference
receives an important role. In our analysis we also show the
impact of the link quality on the overall throughput.
The obtained results motivate the importance of heuristics
aimed at reducing the average communication path length in a
scatternet.