BlueCoDE: Bluetooth coordination in dense environment for better coexistence

Abstract

Dense Wi-Fi and Bluetooth (BT) environments become increasingly common so that the coexistence issue between Wi-Fi and BT is imperative to solve. In this paper, we propose BlueCoDE, a coordination scheme for multiple neighboring BT piconets, to make them collision-free and less harmful to Wi-Fi. BlueCoDE reuses BT's existing PHY and MAC design, thus making it practically feasible. We implement a prototype of BlueCoDE on Ubertooth One platform and corroborate the performance gain via analysis, NS-3 simulations, and prototype-based experiments. Our experimental results show that with merely 10 legacy BT piconets, neighboring Wi-Fi network becomes useless achieving under 1 Mb/s throughput, while BlueCoDE enables the Wi-Fi throughput always remain above 12 Mb/s. We expect BlueCoDE to be a breakthrough solution for coexistence in dense Wi-Fi and BT environments.