Inquiry packet interference in bluetooth scatternets
Brian S. Peterson, Rusty O. Baldwin, Richard A. Raines · ACM SIGMOBILE Mobile Computing and Communications Review · 2004
The key to successfully establishing and maintaining a Bluetooth scatternet is the inquiry procedure which discovers Bluetooth devices within range. The inquiry procedure uses a subset of the hop frequencies used by a piconet. While nodes in a scatternet are in the inquiry substate, they can cause significant interference to the neighboring piconets. Nodes seeking to join a piconet cause significant interference to those neighboring piconets attempting normal communication in the connection mode as well. We develop an analytical model of this interference and extend the model to predict interference from any number of interfering nodes. We show that a single inquiring node is expected to disrupt 1.3% of the packets in a neighboring piconet with interference approaching 73% as the number of inquiring nodes increases.