Bluetooth-based P2P Content Distribution to Mobile Users

Using handheld devices such as PDAs, cellular phones and smart phones for personal entertainment has become commonplace in today’s lifestyle. Most of these devices are equipped with Bluetooth technology that can be used to distribute entertainment contents such as music, movie clips, and commercial films. However, content sharing faces several challenges such as short communication range, limited bandwidth, user mobility, performance variations between Bluetooth cards of different versions and from different manufacturers. This paper analyzes the characteristics of Bluetooth connection establishment and data phases and based on these evaluates the performance of Bluetooth Peer-to-Peer (P2P) communications in a mobile environment. The paper then investigates techniques to enhance Bluetooth content sharing performance. Simulation experiments document the improvements obtained with our proposed techniques.