Bluetooth: channel coding considerations

We have noted that several papers that address the performance of Bluetooth (BT) over a fading channel implicitly assume a perfectly interleaved channel and neglect the bursty nature of a fading channel. The paper analyzes the effects of this incorrect assumption on BT's performance over a frequency-flat Rayleigh block fading channel. Despite the simplicity of the analysis, we obtain interesting results not previously published. We show that neglecting the burst nature of the channel leads to overly-pessimistic conclusions about the performance of Bluetooth in the low SNR region and, thus, that many reported results on the coexistence of Bluetooth and 802.11 are overly-pessimistic. Moreover, we also conclude that the coding strategy used in Bluetooth has little or no effect on a frequency-flat Rayleigh block fading channel.