Performance Analysis of a Data Communication System Employing Bluetooth and Wi-Fi Standards

Bluetooth and IEEE 802.11b (Wi-Fi) standards both coexist and share the same 2.4GHz frequency range of the unlicensed Industrial Scientific and Medical (ISM) radio band. This coexistence of Bluetooth and IEEE 802.11b can cause interference issues and may result in significant performance degradation if parameters of both standards are not properly set. In this paper, we propose to design a data communication system with standard parameters to allow coexistence of both technologies. Also, the performance analysis of a Bluetooth voice link and Wi-Fi data communication system are carried out with the aid of simulations from MATLAB Simulink (R). An audio wav file is used as a source and it is transmitted using Bluetooth voice packets. The performance of the system is observed with Frequency Hopping Spread Spectrum (FHSS) multiplexing techniques. Additive White Gaussian Noise (AWGN) channel is also used in the system and the effect of AWGN is also analyzed during the transmission process. Two different voice packets are used namely HV1 and HV3 voice packets. It is shown that using Bluetooth Standard HV1 voice packet provides better error performance as compared to HV3 voice packet because HV1 packets use 1/3 Forward Error Correction (FEC) while HV3 do not use any FEC. The bit error rate is reduced when Es/No is increased providing improvement in the error performance.