Performance of IEEE 802.11 WLANs in a Bluetooth environment

Abstract—Coexistence of different wireless systems that share the same frequency band is becoming one of the most challenging issue due to the wide-spread popularity of WLANs and to the rapid development of shortrange radio systems. In this paper we consider WLANs based on the IEEE 802.11 standard and a short-range radio system based on Bluetooth specifications, which operate in the 2.4 GHz ISM frequency band. We present a model of the interference that IEEE 802.11 WLANs may experience either because of a voice or a data Bluetooth link. We derive results showing that by applying simple traffic shaping techniques, interference can be significantly reduced. In the presence of Bluetooth data traffic, WLAN packet error probability can be decreased by 19% at the expense of an additional average delay in Bluetooth packet transmission equal to 10 ms, or by 29% at the expense of a Bluetooth average packet delay equal to 110 ms.