Analyzing coexistence issues in wireless radio networks: Simulation of Bluetooth interfered by multiple WLANs

In many fields of technology more mobile transmission paths will be used in the future. In order to ensure a secure transmission of data, studies for coexistence of the used radio technologies with other currently wide used radio systems (WLAN, Bluetooth, ZigBee, etc.), are needed. Since an analytical treatment is too complex and a real test set is usually too expensive, the objective is the construction of a suitable simulation environment to investigate the performance of co-existing wireless systems in an economical way. Investigations of a variety of representative application scenarios indicated, that a universal applicability and adaptability of such a simulation framework can be achieved by a high-grade modular design. To keep the simulation results as realistic as possible, the use of statistical radio channel data was largely omitted. Instead, an accurate recording of the simulated scenario is done to compute the required channel characteristics by ray-tracing/-launching algorithms. The signal processing chains of the transmitters and receivers (user- and jammer-radio) were reproduced precisely to their specifications and for easy interchangeability they are connected to the channel via a universal defined interface. Finally an application scenario (Bluetooth connection interfered by multiple WLAN transmitters) is presented and the results of the simulations are shown and discussed.