Employing dynamic segmentation for effective co-located coexistence between Bluetooth and IEEE 802.11 WLANs

The emergence of Bluetooth as a defacto radio interface has allowed handheld electronic devices to be instantly interconnected as ad hoc networks. Recent studies show that since Bluetooth operates in the unlicensed 2.45 GHz frequency band, the presence of multiple piconets in the vicinity creates intermittent interference on signal reception which, in turn, degrades the overall throughput of the network. Another kind of interference, called as persistent interference, is the one generated by IEEE 802.11 enabled devices as they use the same frequency band as Bluetooth, and thus may lead to significant performance degradation. In order to cope up with both of these interference sources, this paper proposes an interference aware Bluetooth segmentation algorithm (IBLUES), where Bluetooth packet types are selected depending on the packet success probability, which is calculated based on the interference generated both by multiple piconets, as well as by IEEE 802.11 devices. Among other things, we show that when the number of bridge nodes are larger than five the propagation delay between piconets increases rapidly. We have also observed a drastic overhead in the current Bluetooth piconet switching procedure and conclude that future enhancements to this procedure are crucial to efficiency of Bluetooth-based ad hoc networking.