International Journal of Application or Innovation in Engineering & Management (IJAIEM)

Web Site: www.ijaiem.org Email: [email protected]

Volume 4, Issue 2, February 2015

ISSN 2319 - 4847

Modeling, Simulation & Performance Analysis

of Bluetooth
Sejal Dmello, Zahir Aalam and B. K. Mishra
Thakur College of Engineering & Technology, Kandivali (E), Mumbai101.
Thakur College of Engineering & Technology, Kandivali (E), Mumbai101.
Thakur College of Engineering & Technology, Kandivali (E), Mumbai101.

ABSTRACT
Mechanisms based on frequency hopping have been widely used to enable short range wireless networks to use resources from
the unlicensed spectrum without frequency planning. As a price for open access, adverse interference may be experience from
other wireless devices that are transmitting in the same unlicensed band. A basic approach to mitigate this interference is the
application of AFH and attempts to hop over a set (hopset) of less interfered channels. On the other hand, the regulation of
unlicensed operation sets constraints on possible hopset adaptations. In this article we present two novel AFH strategies: EAFH
(Enhanced Adaptive Frequency Algorithm) and SAFH (Smooth Adaptive Frequency Algorithm). The strategies are compared
and their performance is analyzed based on various parameters.

Keywords: SAFH, EAFH, BER, AFH

1. INTRODUCTION
The emerging short-range wireless technologies with ubiquitous usage imply utilization of the unlicensed spectrum. As
a price for open access, the unlicensed wireless network may experience adverse interference from collocated wireless
devices that are transmitting in the same unlicensed band. A wireless network should exhibit adaptive usage of the
unlicensed spectrum so as to attain the best communication performance under the actual interference pattern, while
complying with the regulations for unlicensed operation.
Frequency hopping (FH) is a method to enable sharing of the unlicensed spectrum among proximate networks, since it
achieves frequency diversity and enables spectrum sharing without frequency planning. FH also decreases interference
toward unlicensed devices that operate over a part of the spectrum used by the FH network. This is addressed by
defining rules for spectrum usage that limits the radiated power and constrain the occupancy of the channels used in
hopping. Bluetooth, [1] a prime example of an FH-based networking technology represents an instance of the wireless
personal area network (WPAN), which has been further standardized within the IEEE 802.15 Working Group for
WPAN [2]. A hopset is the set of channels used for hopping. Bluetooth uses a hopset of 79 frequencies in the
unlicensed industrial, scientific, and medical (ISM) 2.4 GHz band.
Recent work has shown that the performance of a Bluetooth can be heavily degraded by interference from other devices.
Interference in the unlicensed band can be mitigated by using either collaborative or non-collaborative techniques. In
collaborative techniques, devices avoid one anothers activity while easily sharing information, where as in Noncollaborative Techniques, devices must adjust their behavior to avoid interfering with others [3]. Adaptive FH (AFH) is
an important non-collaborative mechanism considered in [4] to mitigate the interference. An AFH attempts to select a
hopset that consists of less interfered channels, while the individual channel occupancy conforms to the regulation [5].
From the AFH perspective, there are three different error sources: noise, frequency static (FS) interference, and
frequency-dynamic self-interference.
The rest of this paper is organized as follows: Section 2 describes EAFH algorithm. SAFH algorithm is presented in
Section 3. Section 4 presents the general System model. The performance of the EAFH and SAFH is analyzed, &
compared in Section 5. Finally, concluding remarks are drawn in Section 6.

2. ENHANCED ADAPTIVE FREQUENCY HOPPING

An enhanced adaptive frequency hopping (EAFH) mechanism is used for improving the performance of frequency
hopping-based wireless personal area networks (WPANs). The algorithm monitors the overall Packet error rate (PER)
of the system to determine the right number of channels to be excluded from the hopset. Then based on the PER of
individual channel, it decides whether to exclude a certain channel or not.
In order to exclude the bad channels being interfered from the hopset effectively, the paper [6] presented an EAFH
scheme based on the feedback mechanism of PER. By monitoring the packet error bit, EAFH can determine the right

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International Journal of Application or Innovation in Engineering & Management (IJAIEM)

Web Site: www.ijaiem.org Email: [email protected]
Volume 4, Issue 2, February 2015

ISSN 2319 - 4847

number of channels to be removed from the hopset. Then EAFH will decide which channel is to be removed as per
packet error rate of individual channel.
The channels are parted into three groups. The group A is used to transmit multiple-slot packets, group B used for
single-slot packet, and C is the group of excluded channels. As the channel condition is time-varying, the channel
number of each group may change every time. EAFH can balance the usage rate of each channel and the average usage
rate of all channels, because EAFH can modify the numbers of three channels based on the PER of every channel.
Every user monitors the packet error rate of each channel, and detects all other channels packet error rate at the same
time. Determining the channel which group should be put into, EAFH can mitigate the interference.
The way to eliminate the frequency dynamic interference is that EAFH begin to adjust the channels in the hopset and
the length of the packet, when users detect the external interference. In the initialization, the N channels are assigned
to the A group, the 2N channels are parted into the group C and the rest of channels belong to the group B. After
initialization, EAFH will keep an eye on the packet error rate all the time. While the packet error rate of channel in
group A appears higher than the average packet error rate of all channels, EAFH will switch it with a channel which
has lower PER in group B or C. In the same way, switching between group B and C may occur in certain conditions.
The swap of the three groups can eliminate the unbalance of initial assignment and periodically updates the channels of
each group.
While users detect the severe interference in a certain channel for long time, EAFH will recognize that it is the
frequency interference in the channels and transitorily excluded the interfered channels from the hopset for duration of
T. These channels belong to the subgroup of C, and channels in this subgroup will not join the switching progress.
Although the occupancy of each channel does not equal to the average occupancy, it is closer to the average than
orthogonal hopset mechanisms in general. This is because a EAFH adjusts its occupancy on any channel according to
the interference level.

3. SMOOTH ADAPTIVE FREQUENCY HOPPING

Smooth Adaptive Frequency Hopping (SAFH) is based on Probabilistic channel usage [11]. the algorithm uses a kind
cross-layer scheme of smooth adaptive frequency hopping, which is based on exponential smoothing filter by assigning
usage probabilities to all channels [7]. In this way, SAFH can estimate and predict the channel conditions. Moreover,
the upper layers are available to adapt SAFH by changing the parameters in a cross-layer approach. According to
simulation, SAFH outperforms conventional frequency hopping and AFH.
There are four main elements of the adaptive hopping procedure SAFH has four major steps as illustrated in Figure 1.
First it reads the values of the input parameters , , , and . Then it assigns equal probability to all the channels and
generates an initial hopset based on that. At every interval t, SAFH measures the FER of all the channels FERi(t), and
calculates the average FER.
The other steps of SAFH are invoked when the average frame error rate FER exceeds the predefined threshold (), and
at least one of channels has frame error rate below the threshold; in that case the algorithm uses exponential smoothing
to predict FERi(t + 1), updates the hopping probability and generates a new hop-set.

Figure 1 Block Diagram of SAFH

As is shown in the Figure 1, SAFH has four steps: channel classification, channel prediction, mapping and hopset
generation. AFH has only channel classification and hopset generation. In the first step, by analyzing the channel
quality and measuring the frame error rate, SAFH can determine the frequencies and the power of interference at the
present. SAFH can minimize the risk of incorrect classification. In the second step, SAFH uses exponential smoothing
to predict the frame error rate In the third step, we map FER to a discrete probability distribution to satisfy the desired

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International Journal of Application or Innovation in Engineering & Management (IJAIEM)

Web Site: www.ijaiem.org Email: [email protected]
Volume 4, Issue 2, February 2015

ISSN 2319 - 4847

level of the channel quality. Comparing with conventional adaptive frequency hopping avoiding a bad channel entirely,
SAFH assigns a probability which is a function of its distance from the threshold. In the forth step, SAFH makes the
probability distribution map to a hopset.

4. SYSTEM MODEL

Figure 2. System Model [8]

Simulation of wireless system is a crucial step for performance evaluation [9]. It helps in discovery of design flaws early
in the development process. SIMULINK, an extension of MATLAB is selected for simulation [10]. As a result we are
able to use all features of the software during the analysis process. The Model consists of various blocks as shown in
Figure 2. Opening up these subsystems reveals further levels of details. The 802.11 is generated by a separate
independent block which allows us to control precisely the rate of 802.11 transmissions. In simulation, examination of
the performance and the way the BER is affected is done.

5. SIMULATION RESULTS

Figure 3. Performance of EAFH versus SAFH

The graph denotes the value of BER as observed from the simulation of 2 different systems, one using EAFH and
another using SAFH as the frequency hopping mechanism. The simulation introduced additional interference in the 2.4
GHz band by having a 801.11 transmitter system in vicinity. The primary measurements were done by varying the
amount of noise interference in the system by modifying the SNR of the channel.
It can be observed from the graph that for low values of SNRs i.e. high noise values, SAFH has better performance than
EAFH in terms of BER.

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International Journal of Application or Innovation in Engineering & Management (IJAIEM)

Web Site: www.ijaiem.org Email: [email protected]
Volume 4, Issue 2, February 2015

ISSN 2319 - 4847

Figure 4. Performance of EAFH versus SAFH with SNR=100

As the SNR increases, the BER drops. It can be noted that at higher SNR, both EAFH and SAFH perform almost
equally. This is because as the SNRs improve, noise in channels also decreases. So there is no need of blocking any
channel and all channels can perform at their optimum even without any advanced hoping mechanisms. However,
achieving such high SNR in practice is not always possible and hence for all practical purposes, SAFH provides better
performance than EAFH in terms of BER

6. CONCLUSIONS
In this article we have presented two novel strategies for adaptive frequency hopping (AFH) that operate in the
unlicensed band: Enhanced adaptive frequency Hopping (EAFH) and Smooth adaptive frequency Hopping (SAFH).
Smooth adaptive frequency hopping (SAFH) consists of four steps. First, it performs channel classification, then uses
exponential smoothing filter to make channel prediction; based on the forecast status of the channels, SAFH determines
the probability mass function, which is later mapped to a hop-set for frequency hopping.
An enhanced adaptive frequency hopping (EAFH) mechanism is used for improving the performance of frequency
hopping based wireless personal area networks (WPANs). EAFH could manipulate hopset size and packet length
simultaneously to enhance the coexistence ability of BT devices. An analytical model was developed to predict its
performance.
SAFH has better performance than EAFH in terms of BER.

REFERENCES
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[3] Omer A. Bamahdi, Salam A. Zummo, An Adaptive Frequency Hopping Technique With Application to
Bluetooth-WLAN Coexistence, in Proceedings of the 5thInternational Conference on Networking (ICN06),
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[4] IEEE Std. 802.15.2, Coexistence of Wireless Personal Area Networks with Other Wireless Devices Operating in
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