IEEE 802.15.1 Simulation and BER Analysis under the Interference

There is increasing interest in wireless ad-hoc networks built from portable devices equipped with short-range wireless network interfaces. IEEE 802.11b WLAN (Wi-Fi) and IEEE 802.15.1 WPAN (Bluetooth) are popular wireless emerging technologies. These technologies migrates wired system applications into the wireless domain. Applications includes, computing, sensing, and communication. Growth in the wireless technology started with Wireless Local Area Networks (WLAN), ad-hoc networks (MANET), Wireless Personal Area Networks WPAN, and then Wireless Sensor Networks (WSN). 802.11b occupies unlicensed industrial, scientific and medical (ISM) band (2.4–2.4835 GHz) and uses direct sequence spread spectrum (DSSS) to alleviate the narrow band interference and fading. Bluetooth is also one user of ISM band and adopts frequency hopping spread spectrum (FHSS) to avoid the mutual interference. This paper focuses on the bit error rate issues and need to minimize in communication for multi-hop networks of Bluetooth devices, called scatternets. The model for the network is established and simulated using MATLAB Simulink. The paper also presents some observations on performance degradation of Bluetooth due to mutual interference and interference from neighboring IEEE 802.11 devices