A Social Group-aware and Tunneled Scatternet Formation Scheme
Myeong-a Yang, Yangwoo Ko, Dongman Lee
Information and Communications University
{may, newcat, dlee}@icu.ac.kr
Abstract
Bluetooth is a major technology for short range
wireless communication. Scatternets expand its use to
larger networks. If communication patterns are known
before scatternet formation, frequently
communicating pairs could be connected with fewer
hops to enhance performance. Communication
patterns are obtainable by observing traffic, but it is
ineffective in a pervasive computing environment
where interactions are mostly spontaneous. We
propose to use social group membership as an
estimate of communication patterns. The proposed
scatternet formation scheme forms a scatternet per a
social group and then connects scatternets through
tunnels. In order to ensure that each communication
pair has a reasonable share of bandwidth, the
proposed scheme considers the numbers and the
positions of the tunnels. Simulation results show that
the proposed scheme not only enhances the total
throughput of scatternets but also shares network
capacity more fairly among communication pairs.
1. Introduction
Bluetooth [1] enables cell phones, PDAs, and
notebooks to be connected without wire and is used to
form a Wireless Personal Area Network (WPAN). The
basic communication unit of Bluetooth is a piconet
that consists of one master and up to 7 slaves. To
connect more than 8 Bluetooth devices, multiple
piconets are formed as a scatternet and several
scatternet formation schemes have been proposed
[3][4][5][6][7][8]. One of the important goals in
scatternet formation is to maximize the performance
of a scatternet such as the capacity of a scatternet
[4][7].
Most of scatternet formation schemes form a
scatternet by connecting all devices within an area,
which may cause frequently communicating pairs to
have longer path lengths than optimal ones. If devices
are clustered to form a collection of smaller sized
scatternets or piconets, frequently communicating
pairs will have shorter average paths so the
performance will be improved. Manish et al. [8]
introduce a Communicating Group (CG), defined as a
group of mobile devices with frequent data transfers
amongst themselves. CGs are identified by observing
traffic and finding frequently communicating peers.
However, this scheme does not work well in a
pervasive computing environment where CGs can
emerge and disappear dynamically due to spontaneity
of interactions because it is difficult to reliably
estimate the communication patterns. In a pervasive
computing environment, interactions between two
specific people may last for only a short time.
interactions between people happen spontaneously,
and may last for only a short amount of time especially
between infrequently communicating peers. In this
case, identifying a CG for them may take similar to or
longer than the length of their communication session
and then the identified CG becomes useless. .
In a real world, a person in general belongs to a
social group and interacts with others who belong to
the same social group more often than those who do
not [2]. In this paper, we propose an efficient
scatternet formation scheme exploiting social group
membership as an approximation of a CG. Even
though interactions between two specific people will
not last for long time, communication with the same
social group member may take place with higher
possibility than that with other group members. We
assume that each person knows which social groups he
or she belongs to. Devices belonging to the same
social group form a piconet or a scatternet using the
most well known scatternet formation scheme, TSF
[6]. When there is a need to interconnect a social
group with other social groups which usually lasts for
a shorter amount of time than interactions between
intra-group members, a set of tunnels is selected using
the topology information of the constituent scatternets
and interconnects them through the tunnels unlike the
existing schemes in which the scatternets are merged
into a single scatternet. When selecting tunnels, the
proposed scheme takes into consideration the number
of hops and branches and traffic distribution. Our
scheme not only enhances the total throughput of
scatternets but also shares network capacity more
fairly among communication pairs. The simulation
results show that our scheme achieves higher average
TCP throughput and shows a smaller variance than
TSF.
The remaining sections are organized as follows.
Section 2 briefly explains related work. Section 3
introduces a sample scenario and describes what we
should consider when forming a social group aware
and tunnel based scatternet. The proposed scheme is
described in section 4, and we show the performance
of our scheme’s performance in section 5. Finally,
section 6 concludes the paper.
2. Related Work
2.1. Social Group
A social group is “a number of individuals, defined
by formal or informal criteria of membership, who
share a feeling of unity or are bound together in
relatively stable patterns of interaction” [2]. A person
can become a member of social group when there is
consensus among group members.
The main concerns in [2] are the relation between a
group member and his or her devices, the format of
user group profile, and membership management. It
does not consider how to efficiently facilitate
communication among social groups, which is the
main theme of our work.
2.2. Bluetooth and Scatternet Formation
The Bluetooth Specifications 1.2 [1] defines the
operation of Bluetooth and its protocol. Bluetooth
differs from a contention–based protocol such as IEEE
802.11, since Bluetooth devices form master-slave
links and each slave adjusts its communication
frequency hopping sequence to that of its master.
Bluetooth adopts a time division duplex
communication scheme, where the master decides
which slave communicates with itself in next time
slot. A master has up to 7 slaves and they form a
piconet. A scatternet is proposed to interconnect more
than 8 devices, but it has not been standardized yet.
There have been several scatternet formation
schemes such as Bluemesh[3], Bluenet[4], Shaper[5],
and TSF[6]. Scatternet formation schemes can be
classified by the resulting topology (for example, tree
or mesh), by the type of bridge node (for example,
master-slave or slave-slave), and by whether all nodes
are in transmission range or not. Most of the existing
scatternet formation schemes focus on the formation of
one scatternet without considering social relationships
among devices (or their owners).
Manish et al. [8] proposes the use of a
Communicating Group (CG), defined as a group of
mobile devices with frequent data transfers amongst
themselves, and which forms different piconets for
different CGs. This allows simultaneous
communication in different CGs and hence leads to
higher throughput, lower delays and less packet drops.
This scheme analyzes traffic flow patterns to identify
CGs. It takes relatively long time compared to
communication session in pervasive computing
environment so identified CGs becomes obsolete
quickly. Moreover, even though [8] suggests the use of
CGs, it does not propose a concrete scheme for
forming and adapting piconets to the current state of
CGs.
3. Design Consideration
3.1. Scenario
Our scenario is extended from that of [2]. Several
students are taking a course and they are divided into
three groups for a term project. Let’s call them group
A, B, and C. We assume that all students have
Bluetooth enabled devices. During the class, the
professor asks the students to discuss a subject related
to the class with group members and to present the
relation of their term project with this topic. Groups A,
B, and C form individual networks and start
discussion. While discussing, group members
exchange related data and participate in a
collaborative review process while preparing the
presentation material. After discussion, the three
groups need to be interconnected into a large network
in order to enable students to exchange presentation
materials or give comments in the middle of a
presentation. In addition to the inter-group
communication, there is also continuous intra-group
communication for sharing thoughts with the others in
the same group.
3.2. Social Group-aware Scatternet
Manish et al. [8] propose to observe traffic among
nodes in order to group a collection of nodes in a
space into subgroups of frequently communicating
nodes. However, interconnections between identified
subgroups may last for only a short time due to
spontaneity of interactions and CGs for them quickly
become obsolete in a pervasive computing
environment. We need an alternative way to find
communication patterns that are stable over time.more
efficiently. In a real world, as exemplified above, a
person usually belongs to a social group and
communication mainly happens among social group
members for a considerable amount of time for
collaborative activity [2]. Therefore, Instead instead of
forming a single scatternet, it is more appropriate to
form a separate scatternet for devices belonging to the
same social group and provide a way to connect
corresponding scatternets when there is a need of
interactions across social groups.
To support communication across social groups,
their corresponding scatternets need to be
interconnected. We call this interconnection as a
tunnel. Communication pairs across social groups
have longer paths than that of within groups, so they
will show lower throughput. The path length of an
inter group communication pair can be reduced by
adding more tunnels. For example, if there are two
string (linear?) topology whose numbers of nodes are
100 (too big!); two tunnels that composed of both 33rd
nodes and both 66th nodes shorten average path
lengths than one tunnel that consists of both 50th
nodes. However, too many tunnels decrease the
capacity of the entire network because an additional
tunnel increases the number of branches per node. So
the number of tunnels should be such that the path
lengths of inter-group communication pairs are short
(short 라고 하면 너무 모호하지 않나? optimal 이라
고 하면 안되나? 경로 길이를 가장 짧게 해주는 것
은 아니니, optimal 이라고 부르기는 힘들다고 생각
합니다 bandwidth 관점에서 보면 optimal 한 거 아
닌가? 즉 tunnel 이 너무 많아서 bandwidth 가 줄어
들지 않는 범위 안에서 최대한 패스를 짧게 하는
것이라면 그런점에서는 optimal 한 것이죠. 우리
스킴이 그런지 아닌지는 모르겠고) while the
network capacity is not reduced significantly.
We must consider the position of each tunnel as
well because it determines traffic distribution. Tunnels
forward inter group traffic from one scatternet to
another, so all inter-group traffic is concentrated in
tunnel nodes and their neighbors. If they also forward
a majority of intra group traffic, they may become a
bottleneck. So the tunnel nodes should be selected
from the nodes in which intra-gorup traffic is less
concentrated.
Figure 1 shows the distribution of TCP throughput
per communication pair in a typical scatternets of 20
nodes. TCP throughputs are sorted in a decreasing
order. As you see, a few communication pairs use the
majority of network capacity, while most pairs utilize
very low bandwidth. Even though this problem is
inevitable except for star topology, we need to alleviate
this unfairness. When determining the number and the
positions of the tunnel, we should consider fairness
among intra-group traffic as well.
240
220
200
180
160
Throughput (Mbps)
140
120
100
80
60
40
20
0
Communication pairs
Figure 1. Distribution of TCP throughput per
communication pairs
4. Proposed Scheme
This section describes an overall structure of the
proposed scheme and the metric that is helpful for
choosing tunnel nodes. We will then explain the
proposed scatternet formation scheme in detail.
4.1. Assumptions and overall structure
We assume that each person knows which social
groups he or she belongs to. Devices that belong to the
same social group form a piconet or a scatternet using
an existing scatternet formation scheme. Our current
implementation uses TSF [6]. As exemplified in the
scenario given in Section 3.1, there is a need to
interconnect a social group with other social groups.
We also assume that this information of when and to
which social group they should be connected is known
to member nodes out of band. A Representative of
each scatternet establishes a link to share information
needed for forming tunnels. The election of a
representative node may be different depending on a
scatternet formation scheme. For easier
implementation, we assume that representative nodes
are predefined. This assumption is quite reasonable
because a social group usually has a leader (for
example, the term project leader in our scenario).
After establishment of a link, we can select a set of
tunnels based on the shared topology of the constituent
scatternets. As described Section 3.2, we need to
consider the number and the positions of the tunnels.
For this purpose, we define a metric that estimates the
performance of a scatternet, which we will describe in
Section 4.2. Each representative node evaluates the
metric and finds the best tunnels as described in
Section 4.3.
4.2. Proposed Metric
Our metric calculates the lower bound of the
maximum throughput that a communication pair can
have. A scatternet that maximizes this metric also
maximizes the throughput of traffic that has the lowest
throughput, for example, inter-group traffic that passes
a bottleneck. Therefore, a scatternet with a high metric
value minimizes variations of the throughput of
communication pairs and shares capacity more fairly.
The proposed metric considers the following: 1) the
path lengths of communication pairs (or CP
hereinafter), 2) the number of branches per node, and
3) the link capacity per CP. Since a node utilizes one
link at time, overall performance degrades if we
increase the number of branches to reduce the average
path length. Meanwhile, if we reduce the number of
branches per node, latency becomes longer due to the
increase of the average path length so that overall
throughput also degrades. Link capacity per CP is
defined as a reciprocal of the number of CPs whose
traffic passes through the link. A link that has the
lowest link capacity per CP becomes a bottleneck in a
scatternet because the performance of each CP will be
bound by a link with the lowest link capacity.
Calculating link capacity per CP is done in two
stages. In the first stage, we count the number of CPs
whose traffic passes a link and take an inverse of it.
For example, in Figure 2(a), if we assume that all
source-destination pairs send data, there will be three
CPs: (u, v), (u, w), (v, w). (u, v) and (u, w) will use
link A while (u, w), (v, w) will use link B. Therefore
the link capacity per CP of A is 1/2 and that of B is
also 1/2. In the next stage, we calculate the weighted
link capacity per CP that considers the number of
branches. The weighted link capacity per CP is the
link capacity per CP divided by the number of
branches of neighbor nodes. Between two neighbor
nodes constituting a link, we only consider the node
with more branches. (Here, we assume that each node
spends the same amount of time with any link.) In
Figure 2(b), since node x and node y has two links, if
the load per link for link C is 1/8, its weighted load
per link is (1/8)/2 = 1/16. Since node y has 2 links
while node z has 3 links, if link D’s load per link is
1/9, its weighted load per link is (1/9)/3 = 1/27.
A B
u v w happens in the counterpart scatternet. The scatternet
(a)
C D
x y z
(b)
Figure 2. Link capacity per CP
Based on weighted link capacity per CP, we can
obtain the total network flow. It is a sum of the
individual flow of each source-destination pair. An
individual flow means how much capacity a pair can
occupy for a given capacity. The individual flow of a
pair is the minimum link capacity per CP on their
routing path. Since a longer path increases an error
rate, throughput decreases as a path length increases.
So the total network flow is divided by an average hop
count.
In summary, the proposed metric can be written as
follows.
TotalNetworkFlow
Metric =
AverageHopCount
∑ PathLengthOfCP i
AverageHopCount = i
NumberOfCP
TotalNetworkFlow = ∑ IndividualFlowOfCPi
i
IndividualFlowOfCPi = min Link j CapacityPerCPi
j
4.3. Tunnel Selection Scheme
In this section, we will explain a scatternet
interconnection procedure that selects tunnels between
two social groups wanting
interconnection.(interconnection procedure 에 대한
설명을 넣으라는 것이 아니라 그 procedure 가 어
떤 형태로 구현되느냐 하는 것을 교수님이 질문하
신 것 같습니다. 즉 그 프로시져가 어떤 응용 프로
그램의 일부인지 아니면 프로토콜 스택의 일부인
지. 만약 후자라면 누가 그것을 trigger 하는지 등
을 설명해야 한다는 것이죠. 아래에도 그냥 그림
만 들어 있는데 추가 또는 변경되는 구성요소가
뭔지 그리고 그 역할이 무엇인지 얘기하지 않으면
이해하기가 힘들겠지요.) If two social groups need
to be connected, one of the users such as the leader of
a group initiates the interconnection procedure with
his or her Bluetooth device. This device becomes a
representative node of a group. The interconnection
procedure sends a connection request to the scatternet
formation component of the Bluetooth stack with the
counterpart scatternet’s identifier. The same procedure
formation component starts an inquiry procedure with
Bluetooth which results in a link between the two
representative nodes. One of these nodes that receives
an inquiry packet becomes a master representative
node and the other one does a slave representative
node.
HCI (and scatternet formation
procedure)
Figure 3. Bluetooth protocol stack
The scatternet formation component is notified via
a callback at the end of the link establishment
procedure. The callback function of the slave
representative node sends its scatternet topology to the
master representative node. Discovering the scatternet
topology is out of this paper’s scope, but this
information is easily obtainable. For example, all
nodes know the overall topology in SHAPER [5], and
the root remembers the topology in TSF.
Upon receiving the topology of the counterpart
scatternet, the master representative node computes
which set of tunnels maximizes the proposed metric.
After computation, it sends the result to the slave
representative node. Each representative node sends a
tunnel establishment command to the first tunnel node
candidate. Two tunnel node candidates establish a link
or a tunnel using the same link establishment
procedure explained above. A tunnel node candidate
reports its success or failure of the tunnel
establishment to the representative node of its group.
After receiving the result of tunnel establishment, the
representative node initiates additional tunnel
establishment if needed. Otherwise, it ends the
tunneled scatternet formation.
As described above, tunnels are established one
after another. There are two reasons for sequential
construction of tunnels. First, if several devices
transmit an inquiry packet simultaneously to establish
links, packets will probably collide and thus no link
could be constructed. Second, the tunnel establishment
procedure sometime fails due to the absence of a
counterpart device or for other reasons. Therefore, the
representative node should know if tunnel
establishment succeeds or fails so that it can decide
whether to move to the next tunnel setup or to select
another tunnel candidate. Once all tunnels are
established, a temporary interconnection link between
representative nodes should be removed except when
it is a tunnel.
5. Evaluations
Yangwoo Ko @ ICU 님의 말:
Maneshi 논문에서 CG 부분은 달랑 한두 패러그래
프 뿐이고
Yangwoo Ko @ ICU 님의 말:
아이디어 차원에서만 얘기한거라 구체적으로비교
하기가 사실상 어렵다는 얘기를 좀 넣으면 어떨지
요?
thodlee 님의 말:
고양우씨가 제시한 것은 perf evaluation 에서 얘
기하면
thodlee 님의 말:
되겠네요
5.1. Performance comparison of group-aware
scatternets and group-oblivious scatternets
Our simulation is based on Blueware [9] which
implements most of the functions that a Bluetooth
device should provide, and also supports an
implementation of TSF. Table 1 compares two cases:
group-aware scatternet and group-oblivious
scatternets. A group-aware scatternet refers to a
scatternet that is an interconnection of a set of socially
grouped devices while a group-oblivious scatternet
refers to a scatternet that is formed by connecting all
devices within an area. The group-aware scatternet
formation simulations start with 20 Bluetooth devices
and form two small sized scatternets, each of them
having 10 devices. Two scatternets are then
interconnected by a set of tunnels that have the highest
metric values. The group-oblivious scatternet
formation simulations start with 20 devices and form a
different topology according to a different seed
number. We repeat the simulations with different
traffic patterns 20 times for a given topology. We set
the number of intra-group traffic twice of that of inter-
group traffic since we assume that intra-group
members will communicate more frequently. This
traffic pattern is applied to the rest of the paper.
Group-aware scatternet records a higher average
TCP throughput for intra-group traffic and shows
lower variance as well. Lower variance means that the
throughput distribution among CPs is closer to an
average, so a group-aware scatternet permits CPs to
share network capacity more fairly. In addition to
overall performance, group-aware scatternets offer
higher bandwidth to intra-group traffic without
sacrificing much inter-group traffic.
Table 1. Performance comparison of group aware
scatternets and group unaware scatternet
 Group aware Group unaware Communicating Group (CG), a group of devices that
Inter Intra Inter Intra frequently communicate, and a scatternet constructed
group group group group according to CG shows high throughput. Identifying
traffic traffic traffic traffic CGs takes quite amount time compared to the session
Average TCP time in pervasive computing environments and
Throughput 29.1 52.8 34.8 33.7 identified CGs become obsolete quickly. ( 이 에 대 한
(Kbps) 우 리 의 방 법 요 약 ; ) Therefore we propose to use
Standard social group as an alternative of CG. And if there are
deviation for 55.7 65.9 72.1 77.3 occasional needs to communicate across social groups,
all CPs we interconnect them through tunnels. We also
introduce a metric that is useful for selecting a set of
tunnels that interconnect two social groups. Our
5.2. Relation between the metric and TCP
metric takes into consideration the number of hops
throughput and branches, and the link capacity per
communication pair. ( 성 능 평 가 결 과 요 약 ;)
This section shows the relation between the Simulation results demonstrate that a scatternet
proposed metric and the TCP throughput, which is formed by our scheme shows higher performance than
depicted in Figure 3. The y axis is the average TCP group-oblivious scatternets formed by an existing
throughput of inter-group traffic from 20 experiments scatternet formation scheme. We also show that the
and the x axis is the metric value of a given tunneled proposed metric and the TCP throughput have a close
scatternet. We can conclude that the proposed metric and positive correlation.
is suitable for evaluating a tunneled scatternet since We compare the performance between group-aware
the proposed metric and the TCP throughput of inter- scatternets and group-oblivious scatternets, both of
group traffic has a positive correlation. them are based on TSF. Additional experiments are
needed to demonstrate that our scheme is also an
improvement compared to other scatternet formation
schemes besides TSF.

Figure 3. Relation between the proposed metric and
the TCP throughput of inter-group traffic
6. Conclusion
(많은 수의 디바이스가 연결되는 스캐터넷 에
서 의 formation 문 제 점 제 시 ; ) Most of scatternet
formation schemes form a scatternet by connecting all
devices within an area, so frequently communicating
pairs devices cannot occupy obtain reasonable capacity
due to long average path lengths. (average 가 커진다
고 해서 꼭 나쁜건 아니죠. 자주 통신하는 놈들이
가까이 있으면 되니까.  이상적인 CG 의 경우.
앞의 어디선가 설명한 것 처럼 자주 통신하는 장
치인데도 서로 멀리 떨어지는 “경우도 있다.” 그
런 경우에는 문제가 된다. 안그러고 이렇게 얘기
하면 항상 문제가 된다고 과장되고 얘기하는 것으
로 비칩니다.) Manish et al. [8] proposes the use of a
7. References
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