Lior Ophir

Wi-Fi (IEEE 802.11) and Bluetooth coexistence: issues and solutions

The IEEE 802.11 wireless local area networks also known as Wi-Fi, and Bluetooth wireless personal area networks have independently become the leading wireless network technologies. Both technologies are finding their way into a growing number of mobile devices such as cellphones, smartphones, PDAs, and laptops. Both Wi-Fi and Bluetooth utilize the unlicensed 2.4 GHz ISM band, resulting in a potential for interference between the two. In mobile devices, where the Bluetooth and Wi-Fi radios are collocated in the same device, interference issues become more severe, and need to be dealt with using special mechanisms. Texas Instruments has introduced a BT/WLAN coexistence solution that is being used in a variety of industry products. We address the issue of Bluetooth and 802.11 WLAN coexistence. We discuss the interference problem and the coexistence solution for the case where both radios are collocated in the same device. We further analyze the performance of both technologies when utilizing the coexistence solution, and compare it to the performance without coexistence.