Introduction to Blueweb: A New Bluetooth-Based Multihop Ad Hoc Network

In this paper, we present Blueweb, a self-organizing Bluetooth-based multihop network with an efficient scatternet formation algorithm and a hybrid routing protocol. The Blueweb is designed from the original idea of Bluetree. Blueweb’s scatternet formation uses two mechanisms. One is the role exchange mechanism in which only slave nodes serve as relays throughout the whole scatternet. The other one is the return connection mechanism in which we convert the scatternet from a tree-shaped to a web-shaped topology. Meanwhile, a modified source routing protocol is designed for Blueweb in which we combine the proactive method with the reactive method to discover the optimal path for packet transmission. Qualitative performance analysis shows that Blueweb generates an efficient scatternet architecture and achieves good routing performance.