Mobile Agents for the Dynamic Formation of Bluetooth Scatternets

Abstract. During recent years, there has been an increasing interest in the research and development of Wireless Personal Area Networks (WPANs). In particular, Bluetooth has been widely acknowledged as a suitable solution to enable small electronic devices with wireless connectivity. However, a number of issues remain to be solved before Bluetooth-equipped devices can provide users with full ad-hoc networking capabilities. This paper explores and discusses the applicability of mobile agent technology to address a specific issue in Bluetooth networks: the scatternet formation problem. It is argued that mobile agent technology can be efficiently employed to solve this particular problem in Bluetooth WPANs, overcoming restrictions seen in existing schemes. Simulations results demonstrate the effectiveness of using mobile processing to solve the scatternet formation problem