Enhanced AODV routing protocol for Bluetooth scatternet

Bluetooth is one of the most widespread technologies for personal area networks that allow portable devices to form multi-hop Bluetooth ad hoc networks, so called scatternets. Routing is one of the challenges in scatternets because of its impact on the performance of the network. It should focus on reducing the power consumption in the network because most of the nodes are battery-operated portable devices. In this paper, we propose a routing protocol for Bluetooth scatternets that customizes the Ad hoc On-Demand Distance Vector (AODV) routing protocol by making it power-aware and suitable for scatternets. It enhances the AODV flooding mechanism by excluding all non-bridge slaves from taking apart in the AODV route discovery process. In addition, it improves the AODV route discovery phase by considering the hop count, the predicated node’s power, and the average traffic intensity for each node as metrics for best route selection. By removing HELLO packets, our protocol reduces the control packets overhead and the power consumption in network devices. Simulation results show that the proposed protocol achieved considerable improvements over other enhanced AODV protocols by increasing the data delivery ratio by 10.78%, reducing the average end-to-end delay by 8.11%, and reducing the average energy consumption by 7.92%.