What is piconet?

A piconet is a small Bluetooth network that connects mobile devices wirelessly over a short range of 10m radius, using ultra-high frequency (UHF) radio waves, to form a personal area network (PAN).

A piconet can be formed by at most 8 stations, one of which is the master node and the rest slave nodes. Thus, it can accommodate a maximum of 7 slaves. The master node is the primary station that manages the small network. The slave stations are secondary stations that are synchronized with the primary station.

Communication can take place between a master node and a slave node in either one-to-one or one-to-many manner. However, no direct communication takes place between slaves. Each station, whether master or slave, is associated with a 48-bit fixed device address.

Besides the seven active slaves, there can be up to 255 numbers of parked nodes. These are in a low power state for energy conservation. The only work that they can do is respond to a beacon frame for activation from the master node.