A Practical Approach for Providing QoS in Bluetooth Piconet

− Bluetooth is a promising wireless technology to form the personal area network and is being applied in versatile areas including both IP and non-IP protocol services. The current transport service can only provides best-effort for all master-slave connections. It is a challenge for providing quality of service (QoS) in the Bluetooth piconet because of the feature of master driven Time Division Duplex (TDD). The Bluetooth standard doesn’t address how to meet the QoS requirements. There are several works had addressed this issue, but all works of these approaches require to modify existing Bluetooth specification and devices. To solve the problem, some requirements as following must be meet in an ideal mechanism: (1) practicability for the existing Bluetooth specification and devices, (2) QoS for both IP and non-IP protocol services, (3) different treatment in accordance with protocol service, (4) scalability without any changes to slaves. In this paper, a traffic shaper is proposed in the Logical Link Control and Adaptation Protocol (L2CAP) on master to provide QoS for both IP and non-IP packets and without any modification in the Bluetooth specification. This approach regulates the traffic of different protocol services to comply with the constrained rate in Bluetooth piconet. The prototype is implemented and tested in Linux platform. Experimental results show that our scheme provides QoS and it is practicable in Bluetooth piconet.