Design and evaluation of coexistence mechanisms for Bluetooth and IEEE 802.11b systems

Abstract

Short-range wireless technologies are becoming increasingly important in enabling useful mobile applications. Bluetooth and IEEE 802.11b standards are the most commonly deployed technologies for WPAN and WLAN. However, because both standards share the same unlicensed ISM (Industrial, Scientific, Medical) radio spectrum, severe interference is inevitable and performance can be impaired significantly when heterogeneous devices using the two technologies come into close proximity. The most notable solution to this problem is a frequency domain noncollaborative coexistence mechanism called adaptive frequency hopping (AFH). However, we find that the efficiency of the 'channel classification' sub-process in noncollaborative mechanisms is by and large ignored in the literature. Moreover, we also find that there is no system resources awareness and no interference source genre concerns in IEEE 802.15 Task Group 2 AFH (TG2 AFH) design. Thus, we suggest a new approach called ISOAFH (Interference Source Oriented AFH). With the above considerations, we propose a customized channel classification process, thereby simplifying the time and space complexity of the mechanism. Through our detailed implementation of various coexistence mechanisms in MATLAB Simulink, it is observed that TG2 AFH performance is sensitive to memory and power limitations, while ISOAFH is much less sensitive to these constraints and can keep a much lower channel collision rate. On the other hand, We also study some open issues of a time domain mechanism called MDMS (Master Delay MAC Scheduling). We compare different coexistence mechanisms and find that the performance of each approach very much depends on the efficiency of its sub-processes.