The Mutual Interference Between Bluetooth And 802.11 n MIMO Devices

Abstract

The demand for high data rate WLAN becomes very high. Therefore, The IEEE has standardized the 802.1 ln, which implements multiple input multiple output (MIMO) antennas. The emergence of several radio technologies, such as Bluetooth and IEEE 802.11 WLANs operating on the same 2.4 GHZ unlicensed industrial scientific and medical (ISM) frequency band, may lead to interference and mostly strong degradation in the performance of these technologies, especially when these devices are operating in the same area. Though some studies have addressed the interference between Bluetooth and 802.11 networks, these studies are limited in the sense that they focus on the impact of one technology on the other in specific limited scenarios. Also the studies are limited to the initial versions of 802.11 like the 802.11 b/g. In this thesis we address the mutual impact between the standard 802.11 b/g/n and Bluetooth devices in different scenarios. We quantify the effect of each network on the other. We perform these measurements for all versions of the standard 802.11 for comparison purposes. A special focus is given to the 802.lln standard, which implements multiple antenna system and it's physical and medium access control (MAC) layer have been considerably changed. 802.1 ln promises to provide up to 600Mbps data rate using two 20MHz wide channels ( 40MHz) rather than a single 20MHz channel as in the case of IEEE 802.1 la/b/g. The work is based on measurements from real experimental setup. The results of this work are expected to be very useful for methods that try to enable coexistence of Bluetooth and 802.1 ln based WLAN, and for the designers who try to make the effect of interference as less as possible, especially the devices which have hardware that supports the standard 802.1 ln and Bluetooth