BuSAR: Bluetooth Slot Availability Randomization for Better Coexistence With Dense Wi-Fi Networks

Abstract

The last decade has witnessed the ever-increasing deployment of Wi-Fi networks and the explosion of Bluetooth-based applications. As a result, the coexistence of Bluetooth piconets with highly-dense Wi-Fi networks is a common phenomenon currently. Unlike Wi-Fi that conducts carrier sensing before channel access, Bluetooth adopts frequency hopping based on a predefined hop sequence, which inevitably incurs considerable cross-technology interference to Wi-Fi. While the Adaptive Frequency Hopping technique is standardized for interference reduction, it does not perform well in current practice where densely-deployed Wi-Fi networks commonly cover the whole 2.4 GHz unlicensed spectrum. In this context, this article presents BuSAR, a novel approach to account for the coexistence problem between Bluetooth piconets and dense Wi-Fi networks. BuSAR embodies the first work to aim at mitigating the cross-technology interference between Bluetooth and highly-dense Wi-Fi networks in a distributed manner. At the heart of BuSAR lies a subtle technique called Bluetooth slot availability randomization, which exploits the redundancy of erroneous Bluetooth packets for better Bluetooth/Wi-Fi coexistence. With BuSAR adopted, multiple Bluetooth piconets are guaranteed to operate independently and only a lightweight algorithm is needed to be implemented at each Bluetooth device. Both theoretical analysis and experimental results validate the feasibility and superiority of BuSAR.