COEXISTING BLUETOOTH AND WLAN SYSTEMS: INTERFERENCE AND INTERFERENCE MITIGATION

Abstract

The emergence of several radio. technologies such as Bluetooth, and WLAN operating in the 2.4 GHz unlicensed ISM frequency band may lead to signal interference and result in significant performance degradation when devices are co-located in the same environment. The main goal of this dissertation is to present a simulation environment for the performance evaluation of IEEE 802.1 lb WLAN. and Bluetooth The performance is evaluated when Bluetooth is having either a voice or data traffic, for different type of links. This framework is then used to evaluate the impact. of interference on the performance of Bluetooth and WLAN in terms of their throughput and average packet delay. Then, we apply a traffic scheduling technique known as OVERLAP AVOIDANCE (OLA), which mitigates interference between WLAN and Bluetooth. These techniques can be applied either when WLAN and Bluetooth are able to exchange information as well as when they operate independently of one another. The performance of the D-OLA (for data) technique is also compared with 7 adaptive frequency hopping technique. Results show that by applying these techniques, the interference between 802.11 and Bluetooth can be reduced and the throughput of the two systems is significantly i►nproved. By applying D-OLA scheme, we get more improvement in throughput compared to adaptive frequency hopping scheme but at the cost of higher delay