MATR: A Mobility-Aware Topology Restructuring Scheme for Bluetooth Body Area Networks

Abstract

Bluetooth low energy technology has gradually penetrated into people’s daily life. Nowadays, a number of wearable devices which are embedded with tiny sensors and Bluetooth radio can create a Bluetooth body area networks (BANs). Because of human mobility, the signal strength of Bluetooth links might be decreased with the link distance, increasing the transmission delay and hence dropping the network throughputs. Considering the mobility issue, this paper presents a mobility-aware topology restructuring scheme, called MATR, for Bluetooth body area networks. The proposed MATR mechanism changes the piconet topology for redirecting the traffic flow to the links with better quality. In addition, the proposed mechanism is also extended to restructure the topology of a scatternet, further reducing the transmission delay of link connecting different Piconets. Performance study reveals that the proposed MATR approaches further reduce the transmission delay and the energy consumption for Bluetooth BANs, decrease the network overheads raised by packet retransmissions, and improve the network throughput of Bluetooth radio area networks.