In the recent years, many polling schemes for Bluetooth networks
have been proposed and evaluated. To the authors knowledge,
however, analysis has been carried out mainly through computer
simulations and, up to now, no mathematical treatment of this
topic has been presented. In this paper, we propose an analytical
framework for performance evaluation of polling algorithms in
Bluetooth piconets. The analysis is carried out by resorting to an
effective and simple mathematical method, called Equilibrium Point
Analysis. The system is modelled as a multidimensional finite
Markov chain and performance metrics are evaluated at the
equilibrium state. The analysis is focused on three classical
polling schemes, namely Pure Round Robin, Gated Round Robin and
Exhaustive Round Robin, which are compared in terms of packet
delay, channel utilization, and fairness among users. Both
analytical and simulation results are presented for three relevant
scenarios, in order to validate the accuracy of the analysis
proposed.