Coverage of 802.11g WLANs in the presence of Bluetooth interference

In this paper, the co-existence issue between IEEE 802.11g wireless-local-area networks (WLANs) and Bluetooth (BT) devices is examined and the use of symbol erasures to reduce the impact of this interference source is proposed. The minimum signal-to-interference ratio (SIR) required by an 802.11g WLAN to achieve a target PER of 0.01 with the number of erasures as a parameter is examined. From these SIR values, the coverage of the WLAN access point (AP) when the wireless station (STA) is being interfered by a BT device is studied. Simulation results show that at a high operational E_b/N₀ = 30 dB, the WLAN´s maximum coverage reduces by half as the data rate increases from 6 Mbps to 54 Mbps. The use of symbol erasures significantly enhances the coverage from 250% to 900% and from 40% to 300% when a BT device is 1 m and 10 m away from the STA, respectively. However, there is a threshold for the number of erasures beyond which further improvements in system performance are not obtained.