Coexistence mechanisms for interference mitigation in the 2.4-GHz ISM band

Wireless technologies sharing the same frequency band and operating in the same environment often interfere with each other, causing severe decrease in performance. In this paper, we propose two coexistence mechanisms based on traffic scheduling techniques that mitigate interference between different wireless systems operating in the 2.4-GHz industrial, medical, and scientific band. In particular, we consider IEEE 802.11 wireless local area networks (WLANs) and Bluetooth (BT) voice and data nodes, showing that the proposed algorithms can work when the two systems are able to exchange information as well as when they operate independently of one another. Results indicate that the proposed algorithms remarkably mitigate the interference between the IEEE 802.11 and BT technologies at the expense of a small additional delay in the data transfer. It is also shown that the impact of the interference generated by microwave ovens on the IEEE 802.11 WLAN’s performance can be significantly reduced through the mechanisms presented.