Radio network performance of Bluetooth

A new radio interface named Bluetooth has been developed to provide short range connectivity between various consumer devices. The Bluetooth system operates in the unlicensed 2.45 GHz ISM band and applies frequency hopping over 79 carriers. This paper presents the simulation results of the radio network performance of a large number of co-located Bluetooth units. For a capacity-demanding WWW data traffic model, the interference caused by (on average) 100 concurrent sessions in a single room of size 10 m×20 m results only in a 5% degradation of the aggregate throughput. In general, it is advisable to use long uncoded packet types for data transmission since they have the largest ideal throughput and therefore generate the least interference power. For real-time speech links, frame erasures represent the dominant reason for transmission quality degradation, more than residual payload bit errors. It is thus advisable to use the provided uncoded packet type in order to allow for the largest capacity; a system load of about 30 Erlang yields an average frame erasure rate of 1%