An investigation of the impact of Bluetooth interference on the performance of 802.11g wireless local area networks

In recent years there has been considerable interest in the development of standards for wireless local area networks. In particular, IEEE's 802.11 standard has now been extended to a family of WLAN standards. 802.11a and 802.11g both employ COFDM but operate in different frequency bands. The 802.11g physical layer standard specifies a link adaptive COFDM scheme for operation in the 2.4 GHz ISM band. Operation in this ISM band will leave 802.11g vulnerable to interference from nearby Bluetooth devices. In this paper, the impact of Bluetooth interference upon the physical layer of 802.11g is investigated and methods to mitigate this impact are examined.