Dual Channel Transmission for Coexistence of Bluetooth Piconets with Multi-Slot Packets

Coexistence has become an important problem with the increasing deployment of wireless networks in the unlicensed frequency band. Most collision avoidance schemes developed for the coexistence of Bluetooth and WLAN are not applicable to multiple coexisting Bluetooth piconets due to constant frequency hopping. We propose a dual channel transmission (DCT) scheme to reduce the packet error rate (PER) due to channel collisions 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). We analyze the performance for multiple Bluetooth piconets with multi-slot packets in noisy environment. Performance analysis shows that compared to SCT, DCT can significantly reduce the PER when a small number of piconets coexist, and thus the network throughput can be increased by using DCT.