A bluetooth piconet is an example of what type of network topology?

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2. Networking
3. Piconet

Piconet

Table of Contents

• What Does Piconet Mean?
• Techopedia Explains Piconet

What Does Piconet Mean?

A piconet is a network of devices connected using Bluetooth technology. The network ranges from two to eight connected devices. When a network is established, one device takes the role of the master while all the other devices act as slaves.

Piconet gets its name from the word "pico", which means very small. This very small network is so called because the number is limited to seven devices, plus the master, which limits network and data sharing capability. Data transfer rates vary from 200 to 2,100 kbps at the application.

A piconet is sometimes called a personal area network (PAN) because the range of optimal operation for Bluetooth is 10 meters, about the size of a living room.

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Techopedia Explains Piconet

A piconet is usually implemented with small mobile devices or home devices that need to communicate with each other.

A good example of a piconet is the Playstation 3 (PS3) console gaming system. Instead of having wired controllers, the PS3 implements Bluetooth technology to connect up to four controllers at the same time. The main console acts as the master and the controllers act as slaves. Newer home appliances are also able to communicate through Bluetooth.

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Synonyms

Personal Area Network, Very Small Network

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Related Terms

• Master/Slave
• Personal Area Network

• Bluetooth
• Scatternet

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A piconet is an ad hoc network that links a wireless user group of devices using Bluetooth technology protocols. A piconet consists of two or more devices occupying the same physical channel (synchronized to a common clock and hopping sequence). It allows one master device to interconnect with up to seven active slave devices. Up to 255 further slave devices can be inactive, or parked, which the master device can bring into active status at any time, but an active station must go into parked first.

Some examples of piconets include a cell phone connected to a computer, a laptop and a Bluetooth-enabled digital camera, or several PDAs that are connected to each other.

Overview[edit]

A group of devices are connected via Bluetooth technology in an ad hoc fashion. A piconet starts with two connected devices, and may grow to eight connected devices. Bluetooth communication always designates one of the Bluetooth devices as a main controlling unit or master unit. Other devices that follow the master unit are slave units. This allows the Bluetooth system to be non-contention based (no collisions). This means that after a Bluetooth device has been added to the piconet, each device is assigned a specific time period to transmit and they do not collide or overlap with other units operating within the same piconet.

Piconet range varies according to the class of the Bluetooth device. Data transfer rates vary between about 200 and 2100 kilobits per second.

Because the Bluetooth system hops over 79 channels, the probability of interfering with another Bluetooth system is less than 1.5%. This allows several Bluetooth piconets to operate in the same area at the same time with minimal interference.