Piconet construction and restructuring mechanisms for interference avoiding in bluetooth PANs

Abstract

Bluetooth and IEEE 802.11 (Wi-Fi) are two of the most popular communication standards that define physical and MAC layers for wireless transmissions and operate on 2.4GHz industrial scientific medical (ISM) band. To avoid the rich interference existed in ISM band, Bluetooth adopts a time-slotted frequency-hopping spread-spectrum scheme, preventing the Bluetooth device communication from being interfered for a long time on specific channel. However, the coexistence of Bluetooth and Wi-Fi in the neighborhood degrades the performance of both networks because the two wireless technologies cannot negotiate with each other. To improve the throughput of a given piconet, this paper presents two interference aware approaches. First, an interference aware piconet establishment mechanism, called IAPE, is proposed to consider the frequencies occupied by Wi-Fi and then minimize the interference from Wi-Fi transmissions, when Bluetooth and Wi-Fi coexist in the same space. To further improve the throughput of the constructed piconet, an interference aware piconet restructuring mechanism, called IAPR, is proposed. Performance study reveals that the proposed IAPE and IAPR approaches further reduce the interference between Bluetooth and Wi-Fi and thereby save the energy of Bluetooth device, improving the throughput of Bluetooth personal area networks (PANs).