BlueStar: Enabling Efficient Integration Between Bluetooth WPANs and IEEE 802.11 WLANs

Bluetooth is a radio technology for Wireless Personal Area Networking (WPAN) operating in the 2.4 GHz ISM frequency band. So far, there has been little research on how Bluetooth-enabled devices can effectively and efficiently have uninterrupted access to wide area networks (WAN) such as the Internet. We introduce a novel architecture (BlueStar) whereby selected Bluetooth devices, called Bluetooth Wireless Gateways (BWGs), are also IEEE 802.11 enabled so that these BWGs could serve as egress/ingress points to/from the IEEE 802.11 wireless network. We propose mitigating interference between Bluetooth and IEEE 802.11, by employing a hybrid approach of adaptive frequency hopping (AFH) and Bluetooth carrier sense (BCS) of the channels. AFH labels channels as “bad” or “good”, and Bluetooth devices only access those channels in the “good” state, whereas BCS is used to avoid collision by sensing the channel prior to any transmission. By combining AFH and BCS, we drastically minimize the effect of the worst-case interference scenario wherein both a Bluetooth and an IEEE 802.11 interface are co-located in a single device. BlueStar enables Bluetooth devices, belonging to either a piconet or a scatternet, to access the WAN through the BWG without the need for any fixed Bluetooth access points, while utilizing widely deployed base of IEEE 802.11 networks. Moreover, we define the protocol stack employed by BlueStar as well as indicate how BWGs efficiently manage their capacity allocation through the different systems. We also mathematically derive an upper bound on the number BWGs needed in a Bluetooth scatternet so that uninterrupted access to all Bluetooth devices could be provided.