Accelerated Neighbor Discovery in Bluetooth Based Personal Area Networks

The recent industry standard and specification Bluetooth promises low cost replacement of communication cabling with moderate symbol-rate, short-range wireless links. The same specification also addresses the establishment of point-to-multipoint piconets and the interconnection of several of these piconets into scatternets, enabling Bluetooth to be used as a technology for realizing personal area networks (PAN). In Bluetooth, to establish piconets, nodes have to go through three phases of link activation: i) neighboring device discovery or inquiry, ii) handshake with discovered devices or paging, and iii) negotiation of link parameters. In this paper we are going to investigate the first phase; point out why the current inquiry procedure is inefficient for PAN scenarios, and propose and investigate a novel but backwards Bluetooth compliant modification to the specification with which device discovery can be accelerated.