Performance of the Bluetooth System in Fading Dispersive Channels and Interference

Abstract— A noncoherent limiter-discriminator receiver is often considered for the Bluetooth system because of its simplicity and low cost. While its performance is more than adequate for some channels, the results are significantly degraded in either an interference-limited environment or a frequency selective channel. In this paper, we compare the performance of the traditional limiter-discriminator with integrate and dump filter to a more sophisticated Viterbi receiver. We find that the Bluetooth access code is sufficient to be used for channel estimation in the Viterbi receiver. A comparison is carried out in a Rayleigh fading channel and in the presence of interference either from another Bluetooth piconet or an IEEE 802.11b wireless local area network. Performance metrics include bit error rate and packet loss rate.