Peer to peer video streaming in Bluetooth overlays

As Bluetooth is available in most personal and portable terminals (eg, cellular phone, PDA, videocamera, laptop, etc) Peer-to-peer video streaming through Bluetooth networks is now a reality. Camera equipped Bluetooth phones capture video and broadcast it to other Bluetooth devices and to the infrastructure. Tra ditionally, large scale Bluetooth networks were designed using scatternet concepts. However, many Bluetooth devices do not support Scatternet connections and, even if they support it, they provide only very limited features suitable mostly for static environments. In high mobility situations, a traditional Scatternet design is not useful because of frequent disconnections and reconnections. To overcome these problems, we propose overlaid Bluetooth Piconets (OBP) and simplified overlaid Bluetooth Piconets (SOBP) that interconnect Piconets forming virtual Scatternets. In OBP, every Piconet dynamically reconfigures to collect metadata from neighboring Piconets. If metadata shows the existence of useful data to transfer, an inter-Piconet connection is made to carry out the transfer. SOBP can be used instead of OBP once neighbor Piconets have already discovered each other. In this paper, we compare via analysis and simulation the throughput and efficiency of OBP, SOBP and Scatternet for video applications. We demonstrate the feasibility of video over OBP and SOBP for a representative application.