Interference aware Bluetooth packet scheduling

Bluetooth is a radio technology for Wireless Personal Area Networks operating in the 2.4 GHz ISM band. Since both Bluetooth and IEEE 802.11 devices use the same frequency band and may likely come together in a laptop or may be close together at a desktop, interference may lead to significant performance degradation. The main goal of this paper is to propose a scheduling algorithm aimed at reducing the impact of interference. This algorithm takes advantage of the fact that devices in the same piconet will not be subject to the same levels of interference on all channels of the band. The basic idea is to utilize the Bluetooth frequency hopping pattern and distribute channels to devices such that to maximize their throughput while ensuring fairness of access among users. Simulation results are given for selected scenarios and configurations of interest. Keywords— WPANs, Bluetooth, Interference, max-min fairness, scheduling.