Coexistence mechanisms for interference mitigation between IEEE 802.11 WLANs and Bluetooth

Different wireless systems sharing the same frequency band and operating in the same environment are likely to interfere with each other and experience a severe decrease in throughput. We consider IEEE 802.11 WLANs and Bluetooth-based WPANs, which operate in the 2.4 GHz ISM bands. We propose two coexistence mechanisms based on traffic scheduling techniques, which mitigate interference between the two technologies. The proposed algorithms can be applied either when 802.11 and Bluetooth are able to exchange information as well as when they operate independently of one another. Results show that through the proposed coexistence mechanisms the interference between 802.11 and Bluetooth can be reduced and the throughput of the two systems is significantly improved at the expense of a small additional delay in the transfer of data traffic.