Performance Analysis of the Bluetooth Physical Layer

Bluetooth is an emerging, short range, indoor wireless network technology, based on FH-CDMA/TDD, which allows a collection of devices to form small overlapping networks, called piconets, in an ad hoc fashion. It is likely that the Bluetooth specification may be adopted in the IEEE 802.15 Wireless Personal Area Network standard. In this paper, we present an analysis of the Bluetooth physical layer. We consider a single room office environment (LOS propagation), with a number of piconets distributed in it. In the present work we have focussed only on the interference between piconets. Assuming a uniform distribution of Bluetooth devices in the room, we provide an analysis of the outage probability as a function of the number of overlapping piconets. We then characterise the temporal correlation in the outage process. This leads to an approximation for the mean outage duration. Combining the outage probability with the mean outage duration, we provide a 2-state Markov model for the Bluetooth channel.