AbstractDistributed object‐oriented platforms are increasingly important over wireless environments for providing frameworks for collaborative computations and for managing a large pool of distributed resources. Due to limited bandwidths and heterogeneous architectures of wireless devices, studies are needed into supporting object‐oriented frameworks over heterogeneous wireless environments and optimizing system performance. In our research work, we are working towards efficiently supporting object‐oriented environments over heterogeneous wireless environments. In this paper, we report the issues and our research results related to the efficient support of Java RMI over a Bluetooth environment. In our work, we first implement support for Java RMI over Bluetooth protocol stacks, by incorporating a set of protocol stack layers for Bluetooth developed by us (which we call JavaBT) and by supporting the L2CAP layer with sockets that support the RMI socket. In addition, we model the cost for the access patterns of Java RMI communications. This cost model is used to guide the formation and optimizations of the scatternets of a Java RMI Bluetooth environment. In our approach, we employ the well‐known BTCP algorithm to observe initial configurations for the number of piconets. Using the communication‐access cost as a criterion, we then employ a spectral‐bisection method to cluster the nodes in a piconet and then use a bipartite matching scheme to form the scatternet. Experimental results with the prototypes of Java RMI support over a Bluetooth environment show that our scatternet‐formation algorithm incorporating an access‐cost model can further optimize the performances of such as system. Copyright © 2005 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.