Arbitration-Based Deadlock Mitigation Mechanism for Fast Connection Establishment in Autonomous Self-Organized Bluetooth MANETs

Bluetooth MANETs that consist of Bluetoothenabled terminals are mobile ad hoc networks (MANETs), and can be used for prospective communication methodologies in disaster situations. The minimization of latencies in a connection between Bluetooth-enabled terminals is the most important research issue with Bluetooth MANETs. In order to counter the issue, we have proposed a combination method between Classic Bluetooth (Classic) and connection-based Bluetooth Low Energy (BLE). However, the latency of the combination method is still large and has limited applicability to Bluetooth MANETs in real world scenarios. In this paper, we propose a new fast connection establishment method for Bluetooth MANETs to minimize the latency by utilizing both BLE-broadcast and Classic. In addition, since the procedure of connection establishment between terminals is performed in an autonomous distributed manner, the statuses of terminals can become deadlocked. To tackle this problem, we also propose and employ a new arbitration method by using uniquely assigned IDs for each terminal. We have implemented and evaluated our proposed method as applications for smartphones with Android OS. As a result, we can confirm that our proposed method has a reduced latency. In addition, we have demonstrated that our proposed method can achieve a 3-second latency in a configuration with deadlocks. Furthermore, we have confirmed that our proposed method can be frequently applied to largerscaled networks.