Evaluation of Co-channel and Adjacent Channel Interference for Multiple Bluetooth Piconets with Dual Channel Transmission

The paper proposed a frequency diversity technique for Bluetooth, namely dual channel transmission (DCT), to reduce the packet error rate (PER) due to inter-piconet interference when multiple Bluetooth piconets coexist. With DCT, the same packet is transmitted on two distinct frequency hopped channels simultaneously, and the power used in each channel is half of what would be used in single channel transmission (SCT). A packet is successfully received if at least one channel survives. There is a tradeoff between the increased reliability due to the diversity offered by DCT, and the potentially increased interference due to the use of extra channel. The authors evaluate the performance of DCT when co-channel and adjacent channel interference, as well as wireless propagation characteristics are considered. It is shown that with DCT, the PER is significantly lower than that of SCT when a small number of piconets coexist. Numerical simulations validate the analysis and demonstrate the effectiveness of DCT.