Real-Life Deployment of Bluetooth Scatternets for Wireless Sensor Networks

Bluetooth scatternets are constructed from overlapping piconets, allowing any number of nodes to be connected into amulti-hop wireless network. Although the topic has been researched for 15 years, no deployments of self-organized scatternets have been published. Recently we have presented the SFX algorithm, which was implemented on commercial Bluetooth nodes and is an extension of SHAPER from 2003. Here measurements are presented for scatternet trees for a laboratory network of 24 nodes and for deployment in a photovoltaic power plant with 39 nodes. The results demonstrate the effectiveness of the SFX algorithm, which is evidently the only actually implemented scatternet contruction procedure which is distributed and does not assume full node-to-node visibility.