Coexistence of IEEE 802.11b WLAN and Bluetooth WPAN
Stephen J. Shellhammer · John Wiley & Sons, Inc. eBooks · 2002
Both IEEE 802.11b wireless local area networks (WLANs) and Bluetooth wireless personal area networks (WPANs) operate in the same unlicensed frequency band. The use of a common frequency band for various incompatible wireless systems is fundamentally different than what has gone on in the past. Typically, as in a cellular phone system, the service provider has purchased the rights to use a specific frequency band in a geographic area. In a cellular system the band is often subdivided into two subbands so that two cellular providers can service the same market. However, the two providers do not share the exact same band.The use of a common medium for multiple devices operating according to the same protocol has been around for years. For example, in Ethernet many computers are connected to a common cable. In systems that share the same medium one layer in the communication protocol is specifically designed to control the use of this shared medium. This layer is called the Medium Access Control (MAC) layer. But in all these cases the systems sharing the medium all conformed to the same specification. However, we now have totally different systems (i.e., 802.11b and Bluetooth) sharing the same medium.As a result of these two wireless systems using the same shared medium there has been concern about the coexistence of these systems in a common location. The IEEE 802.15.2 WLAN/WPAN Coexistence Task Group was formed to address the issue of coexistence of these wireless systems. In this chapter, I describe the work of the IEEE task group, which includes modeling of the interference of IEEE 802.11b and Bluetooth and proposals for minimizing the mutual interference of these two systems.