Mitigating the effects of intermittent interference on Bluetooth ad hoc networks

Bluetooth is a promising wireless technology aiming at supporting electronic devices to be instantly interconnected into short-range ad hoc networks. Recent studies show that since Bluetooth operates in the unlicensed 2.45 GHz frequency band, the presence of multiple piconets in the vicinity creates intermittent interference on signal reception which, in turn, degrades the overall throughput of the network. In order to cope up with this interference source, this paper proposes a sophisticated interference aware Bluetooth segmentation algorithm (IBLUES), where Bluetooth packet types are selected depending on the packet success probability, which is calculated based on the interference generated by multiple piconets. Among other things, we show that when the number of bridge nodes are larger than five the propagation delay between piconets increases rapidly. We have also observed a drastic overhead in the current Bluetooth piconet switching procedure and conclude that future enhancements to this procedure are crucial to efficiency of Bluetooth-based ad hoc networking.