Characterizing the Robustness of Wi-Fi and Bluetooth against Continuous Wave EM Disturbances inside a Reverberation Chamber

Abstract

This paper describes a detailed test setup and procedure to characterize the robustness of Wi-Fi3 and Bluetooth 4.2 against continuous wave electromagnetic disturbances inside a reverberation chamber. Bluetooth 4.2 robustness was also characterized by continuous broadband noise. These experiments aim to reveal the susceptibility of commonly used wireless communication protocols against continuous wave noise. Results show that Wi-Fi3 has an abrupt rise in the packet error rate (up to ≈ 100%) when the continuous wave noise overlaps with the Wi-Fi3 working frequency. Bluetooth 4.2 is robust against continuous wave noise, thanks to the frequency hopping technique, but fails against broadband noise.