An adaptive bluetooth packet selection and scheduling scheme in interference environments

Abstract

Bluetooth is a new technology for Wireless Personal Area Networks (WPANs). It intends to eliminate the need of wires and connectors between a variety of devices, like PCs and their peripherals, walkmans and their earphones, etc. Bluetooth provides robust and secure wireless radio communication of both data and voice, even when the devices are not within line-of-sight. Bluetooth employs the 2.4 GHz ISM band, sharing the same band with the Wireless LAN (WLAN) implementing the IEEE 802.11 series standard. While WLANs and WPANs are complementary rather than competing technologies, the likelihood of mutual interference may occur unexpectedly, which may impact the performance of either severely. In this paper, we propose a Bluetooth channel state dependent data segmentation and reassembly (CSD-SAR) scheme and a queue state dependent priority (QSD-PR) scheduling policy. The CSD-SAR maintains a receiving frequency table to predict channel conditions and selects the best packet type and packet size to transmit data. In this way, it not only masks bad frequencies without delaying transmission but also leads to the best performance with high link utilization in error-prone environments. In addition, the QSD-PR also uses the receiving frequency table to avoid bad frequencies and gives a selected master–slave pair, which has more queued data to send between each other, a higher priority to eliminate the wastage of slots. The conventional scheduling policy, Round Robin (RR), yields poor performance with the time division duplex based MAC protocol and results in slot wastage and may not ensure fairness. Simulation results show that our proposed scheme achieves better link utilization and higher throughput with bounded delay compared to the RR scheme in error-free and error-prone environments. Our scheme can also eliminate interference to other wireless networks that share the same spectrum, such as WLANs, by avoiding selecting channels occupied by other networks.