Performance Evaluation of Bluetooth Polling Schemes: An Analytical Approach

In the recent years, many polling schemes for Bluetooth networks have been proposed and evaluated. To the authors knowledge, however, analysis has been carried out mainly through computer simulations and, up to now, no mathematical treatment of this topic has been presented. In this paper, we propose an analytical framework for performance evaluation of polling algorithms in Bluetooth piconets. The analysis is carried out by resorting to an effective and simple mathematical method, called Equilibrium Point Analysis. The system is modelled as a multidimensional finite Markov chain and performance metrics are evaluated at the equilibrium state. The analysis is focused on three classical polling schemes, namely Pure Round Robin, Gated Round Robin and Exhaustive Round Robin, which are compared in terms of packet delay, channel utilization, and fairness among users. Both analytical and simulation results are presented for three relevant scenarios, in order to validate the accuracy of the analysis proposed.