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Analysis of the Bluetooth device discovery protocol

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Abstract

Device discovery and connection establishment are fundamental to communication between two Bluetooth (BT) devices. In this paper, we give an analytical model of the time it takes for the master in a piconet to discover one slave. We show that, even in the absence of packet interference, the discovery time can be long in some instances. We have simulated the discovery protocol by actually implementing it to validate the analytical model. By means of simulations, we show how discovery time is affected by (i) the presence of multiple potential slaves, and (ii) changes in the maximum backoff limit. Using simulation studies we observed the effectiveness of two proposed improvements to device discovery, namely, (i) avoiding repetitions of the A and B trains before a train switch, and (ii) eliminating the idea of random backoff, or reducing the backoff limit. We show that discovery time can be reduced by avoiding repetitions of the A and B trains before a train switch. However, complete elimination of the random backoff is not a good idea, as discovery time will be too long when the number of BT devices is large. Instead, choosing a small backoff limit of 250–300 slots is highly effective in reducing discovery time even in the presence of a large number (say, 50) of potential slaves.

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Acknowledgements

This work was partially supported by the Ministry of Education, Culture, Sports, Science and Technology, Grants-in-Aid for Scientific Research, 20500071 and 19200005 and Ministry of Internal Affairs and Communications in Japan, SCOPE project(071502003).

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Software and Information Science, Iwate Prefectural University, Iwate, Takizawamura, 020-0193, Japan

    Goutam Chakraborty

  2. Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, University of Waterloo, Waterloo, Canada, N2L 3G1

    Kshirasagar Naik

  3. Research Institute of Electrical Communication, Tohoku University, Sendai, 980-8577, Japan

    Debasish Chakraborty

  4. Research Institute of Electrical Communication, Graduate School of Information Science, Tohoku University, Sendai, 980-8577, Japan

    Norio Shiratori

  5. Department of Computer and Information Science, Fordham University, Bronx, NY, 10458, USA

    David Wei

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  1. Goutam Chakraborty
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  2. Kshirasagar Naik
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  3. Debasish Chakraborty
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  4. Norio Shiratori
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  5. David Wei
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Corresponding author

Correspondence to Debasish Chakraborty.

Additional information

A preliminary version of this paper was presented at the IEEE Vehicular Technology Conference, Fall 2004 [2].

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Chakraborty, G., Naik, K., Chakraborty, D. et al. Analysis of the Bluetooth device discovery protocol. Wireless Netw 16, 421–436 (2010). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11276-008-0142-1

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