An improved packet collision analysis for multi-Bluetooth piconets considering frequency-hopping guard time effect

Operating in the unlicensed 2.4-GHz ISM band, a Bluetooth piconet will inevitably encounter the interference problem from other piconets. With a special channel model and packet formats, one research issue is how to predict the packet collision effect in a multipiconet environment. In several earlier works, El-Hoiydi (2001), El-Hoiydi and Decotignie (2001), Lim et al. (2001), this problem is studied, but the results are still very limited in that packets are usually assumed to be uniform in lengths and in that time slots of each piconet are assumed to be fully occupied by packets. These assumptions have been successfully removed in the analytical results proposed in Lin and Tseng (2003). In this paper, we further improve the analytical results in Lin and Tseng (2003) by taking into account the frequency-hopping guard time effect in Bluetooth baseband. The result would offer a way to better estimate the network performance in a multipiconet environment.