藍芽 (Bluetooth) 是一種短距離無線通訊技術，主要應用在個人無線通訊網路。在藍芽中一個Piconet是由一個Master 及最多七個Slaves組成，一個以上的Piconets可以形成一個Scatternet。在形成Scatternet時，服務的提供者及需求者可能不處於同一Piconet中，所以必須透過連接不同Piconets的Bridges 來提供跨Piconet(s) 的服務。然而，現今藍芽的規格中，並無制定Bridge(s)該如何在Piconets間切換的規則。一個不好的Bridge排班，可能會導致Scatternet的產能下降或造成傳輸延遲過高等問題。在本篇論文中，我們針對Piconets間的通訊提出一個Bridge排班的方法，此方法我們稱為Traffic-Aware Scatternet Scheduling (TASS)。在TASS中，我們利用Masters之間流量資訊的交換來估計Master未來與Bridge的通訊時間，而且利用這些流量資訊來排定各Master使用Bridge的時間，以盡量增加網路的整體產能。此外，我們以Sniff省電模式為Bridge切換Piconets間的方法，使得Master在不使用Bridge(s)時，Bridge(s) 能進入省電模式以減少電量的消耗。我們利用模擬的實驗，證明我們提出的方法比先前學者所提的方法，有較好的整體產能表現，對不同Piconets間的交通流量也能作出較有效率的排班。 Bluetooth is a low cost, low power, short-range radio technology, and it has created the notion of a Personal Area Network (PAN). Bluetooth scatternet is a set of piconets that are interconnected by some specific bluetooth devices. The bridge interconnecting the piconets in a scatternet, need to time division multiplex their presence in each of their piconets and thus need an inter-piconet scheduling algorithm. A bad inter-piconet scheduling may seriously degrade the system performance, such as low throughput or high transmission delay. In this paper an inter-piconet scheduling based on traffic information is proposed and analyzed with simulations. This algorithm is called Traffic-Aware Scatternet Scheduling (TASS). We utilized a scheduling table to exchange the traffic information between all Masters that interconnected by the bridge, and allocate the bridge service time to each piconet upon the traffic information. Simulation results demonstrate that TASS outperform another inter-piconet scheduling with higher network throughput and better adaptivity in the variant traffic load environment.
