A fault tolerance test enabling QoS in a Bluetooth piconet

An important trend, in personal area networks, is that time critical application becomes more common, e.g., voice over IP, video phone calls, network games. This segment of applications demands for quality of service (QoS) guarantees, to provide the correct functionality. The Bluetooth standard provides an optional interface to support QoS guarantees, but the standard does not suggest any actual implementation. A wireless communication channel is stochastic by nature, providing QoS guarantees with this precondition make traditional deterministic real-time theory obsolete. In this paper a probabilistic fault tolerance test enabling quality of service guarantees in a Bluetooth piconet is given. The basic Bluetooth network architecture is based on a master-slave configuration, i.e., a point to point connection. More advanced network architectures are possible where up to eight Bluetooth equipped units can be active members of one network (piconet). Furthermore, several piconets can interconnect and form a so called scatternet