TCP/IP over the Bluetooth Wireless Ad-hoc Network

Bluetooth is a wireless ad-hoc network concept that was presented in February 1998 by its five original promoters Ericsson, Nokia, IBM, Toshiba and Intel. With Bluetooth, mobile terminals within range of each other can set up adhoc connections for both synchronous traffic, e.g. voice, and asynchronous traffic, e.g. IP-based data traffic. In this paper we analyse how well Bluetooth can carry TCP/IP traffic and in particular we show that though the radio channel is very disturbed the TCP Vegas protocol with its flow control mechanism can be carried very well. With ARQ handled at the Bluetooth level, retransmissions are made immediately after a packet error and thus the delays, normally introduced are kept acceptably short. In our model important mechanisms in TCP Vegas as well as Bluetooth mechanisms are modelled in detail and we show that TCP throughput is quite high and delays are kept short for packet error probabilities up to 50% and moderate loads.